Nothing’s more important than game one, unless it’s game two, three, four, five, six or seven—the allest-importantest of games
The media personalities who talk and write about hockey want you to know something about game one of an NHL playoff series. It’s “important,” they say. It’s also “big,” maybe even “critical.” Basically, if you want to advance to the next round, you pretty much have to win game one—unless you don’t win game one, in which case game one was “just one game.” And even if you do win game one, you need to play game two as though you’d lost game one. So game one of a series is big and important right up until the moment it ends, at which point it immediately becomes so insignificant that one must never, ever think of it again.
Game two is “crucial.” This is especially true for the team that won game one, because winning game two would result in a “commanding” 2–0 lead in the series. (A “commanding” lead is the most desirable lead you can have in a series, short of a “stranglehold.”) But it’s even more especially true for the team that lost game one—because winning game two is now necessary to “salvage the split.” According to hockey commentators, a series split can only ever be “salvaged,” much like an instance of havoc is always “wreaked” and a defenceman named Subban is always “insufferable.”
Game three? “Pivotal,” always pivotal. (Pivotal means “crucially important”—making it a more important “important” than regular importance.) The winner leaves with either a 3–0 series lead (a stranglehold!), or with “new life,” or with “the momentum.” One thing is beyond debate about game three: It is undeniably the most important game since the previous game, and until the next game. Footnote: “Game three” is sometimes misidentified by Bob Cole as “game five” or “the Ottawa player.”
Game four is the first game in a series that can be “potentially decisive.” That’s why we often hear game four described as a “must-win”—in the sense that a team down 3–0 must win the game if it wants to keep playing, but also in the sense that a team down 2–1 must win the game, except not really. A lot of games that are described as “must-win” games are, in fact, “should-win” games, or “winning-yes-please” games.
Game five is so important that no analyst dares refer to it as “important,” largely because that doesn’t make it sound important enough. This is why game five is routinely described as “all-important,” which is the most amount of “important” that a game can possibly be—unless it leads to a game six, which then itself becomes “all-important,” retroactively rendering game five, at most, “some-important.”
The question remains, however, whether the “all-important game five” will be the “potentially decisive all-important game five” or the “all-important game five that’s all-important because the winner will have a chance to advance in the crucial, potentially decisive, must-win (for one team), all-important (for both teams) game six.”
Game seven, despite clearly being the allest-importantest of games, is so important that its importance is rarely referenced. Instead, “game seven” has itself become an adjective to denote importance. For instance, game six can have a “game-seven atmosphere,” whereas no one has ever said a game is replete with “game-five tension.”
What’s beyond doubt is that game seven will be the most important of all the all-important games that a player will play—unless his team wins, at which point attention will shift to the next game one, which we’d all agree is “important.”
To sum up, every game in the playoffs is important, or all-important, unless it’s already been played, in which case it’s less important, or unless it’s yet to be played, in which case it’s even more important. I know we’re all relieved that hockey commentators have cleared that up for us.
This column originally appeared in Sportsnet magazine. Subscribe here.
