Sports will never play out the way our hearts want them to. The narratives we construct around these professional competitions are comforting, yet ultimately hollow. I feel like not enough people understand this.
You’re going to absorb an array of useless information about this hockey game on Saturday night between the Toronto Maple Leafs and the Boston Bruins. It’s the first time the Leafs have been back to Boston since losing their grasp on a three-goal lead in the third period of the seventh game of the first round of the 2013 playoffs, eventually losing in catastrophic overtime fashion as we all believe only our favourite teams can.
I don’t have any emotional tie to the Maple Leafs or professional hockey in general, but I do live in the city of Toronto and it was very plain to see the level of agony this particular loss caused a great deal of people. I remember watching the game in the office here at Sportsnet’s world headquarters along with several seasoned, level-headed, well-versed journalists that I trust and admire, and even they seemed a little hard done by the experience of it all. I texted a Maple Leafs-supporting friend immediately after the events, typing something along the lines of, “well wasn’t that some s–t,” and didn’t even get a response. She was too crushed. I scrolled through the reaction on Twitter and found a forlorn wasteland of pity and despair. Honestly, I found it all super weird.
But I do comprehend the reality that a lot of people care a great deal about this hockey game. It’s the reason I’m writing this right now. And I also understand that a lot of people like me who are paid to talk or write about sports will try to frame this somewhat inconsequential early-November hockey game in the confines of a narrative. This will be the Maple Leafs’ opportunity to exact revenge. For fans, it will be a chance to exorcise the demons of game seven. The players and fans alike will finally be able to get past the flashbacks and the psychological horror show of it all, regaining their faith in themselves and the greater structure of a hockey team that surely will not disappoint this time around. And if the Maple Leafs lose, it will become the curse of the TD Garden; how this team just can’t win on this ice and is clearly still haunted by its failures in game seven. How the demons are still alive.
I kid you not, a paid reporter, a person otherwise sound of mind and function, will actually approach a Maple Leafs player at some point between now and Sunday and ask him if his performance is being affected by game seven. The question is almost beautiful in its lunacy. And I guarantee you it will be asked because as humans we are constantly striving for a way to make sense of this all. A way to take a fairly meaningless exercise such as a hockey game and package it into a familiar story arc people can relate to—a welcoming narrative that explains away the chaos of it all, much like religion.
But the problem is that hockey games are not stories. Stories have been created with some thought; they are manufactured in such a way as to make sense at the end, as if every event, every scene and every word were constantly crescendoing towards this satisfying finale. Sports are not like that. Sports are random. You can’t rely on a group of existentially singular professional athletes, armed with the everlasting power of free will and playing a game ruled by the unbending laws of physics, to make things happen in a narratively-satisfying fashion. It’s a ridiculous thing to expect.
As much as some may want to ignore it, you have to see the craterous gulf between fiction and reality. How those two things work in direct opposition of each other. Stories are so satisfying and welcoming and wrap-yourself-in-that-warm-blanket-like-a-cherub-cheeked-newborn comfortable because they’re not real. They’re made up. Sports, while often packaged like a story, are forever at the mercy of reality and its randomness.
It might be nice if the star player, who is out there mere days after the death of his saintly grandfather and is playing with ol’ pappy’s initials written inside of his gloves, who has been in a slump of late, who left the game earlier with some ambiguous injury only to return when his team needed him most—really showing his grit by sucking it up in gut-check time—was streaking in on a breakaway with the game on his stick, seeming certain to score a heroic goal in the final seconds, propelling his team to victory and giving all of his story lines a fitting, satisfying conclusion. But it’s just as likely that his stick snaps as he goes to shoot, or he catches a poor patch of late third-period ice and spins out, or a row of arena lights comes loose from the rafters, falling to the ice and flattening the poor soul from on high like an uncompromising fist of God.
In sports, anything can happen. And the things that happen will not always make you happy. You will not always relate to the events on a sublime, ethereal level that feels earned. For this, I am sorry. But someone had to tell you.