Last week, a gritty and action-packed championship series came to a dramatic conclusion, with the team many thought was the weaker of the two walking away with the trophy. I am speaking, of course, about the Stanley Cup finals, in which the Boston Bruins beat the Vancouver Canucks.
I’ll stop for a moment and explain for my readers who are not from the Northeast. Hockey is a game played on a sheet of ice, there are two teams, each with a goal, and the team with the most goals wins. It’s similar to soccer, only it’s interesting. The National Hockey League has its playoffs every spring, and the winner gets the Stanley Cup.
I didn’t watch Game 7 in a bar somewhere with Boston fans. No, I spent it at the Canadian Embassy.
I grew up playing hockey, and the Bruins were always my team. I followed them for years, but started losing interest when a management dispute canceled a season several years ago. But for some reason, I started getting a little interested in it again this year, I even saw a Bruins game in Boston around Christmas. You could probably accuse me of hopping on the bandwagon, and I probably would not argue in this case.
So when I walked into the Canadian Embassy wearing a Bruins jersey, I hoped to settle some doubts about my affiliation. Also, I wasn’t really shocked that no one else was wearing a jersey. The embassy was hosting a party for the game, including free food and Canadian beer. They ran out of sliders and gravy fries, or “poutine” as they call them, but lucky, there was plenty of Alexander Keith’s and Labatt Blue to fill up on. The game was on the CBC, of course.
It was a physical first period, with the crowd hanging on every play, because up there, they apparently really care about the sport, even though they don’t have many teams. By the middle of the second period, when it looked pretty clear that Boston was going to win it, the room began clearing out.
Throughout the night, people kept coming up and talking to me, not in a trash talking sort of way, but more out of curiosity. Maybe that’s what trash talking is in Canada. Some thought I was with Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick’s office, while some few closeted New Englanders stopped me to say they liked my jersey, some Candians stopped me to say they wanted the Bruins to win, if only because they hated the Canucks so much. Kal Penn, the actor from the Harold and Kumar movies, was there, and I’m still not really sure why.
When the game ended, I saw a lot of anger, much as we saw in the Vancouver riots. People fiercely walked up to me smiling, shaking my hand and congratulating me on my team’s win. It was chaos. They realized there were no cars in the room to flip over or set on fire, so they walked out of the building in an orderly fashion and made their way home. What a crazy scene it was. I’m lucky my group and I got out of there unscathed.