Playoff time

Well, round 2 of the Stanley Cup playoffs starts tomorrow and for some reason this year I can't help but thinking of a certain Canucks playoff run 15(!) years ago. I was away at boarding school on an Island in the Pacific where most people had no idea about hockey and couldn't figure out why I was so excited about it...I spent the first half of the playoffs cheering for the Canucks all alone.

We had some strict rules surrounding television viewing which included no TV between the hours of 8:00 pm and 9:30 pm and 10:00 pm and 5:00 ish pm. Being a few hours behind the west coast this meant that a lot of the Canucks games where during class time, especially once they started playing on the East Coast. And since TV time was limited and there was only one TV in the dorm, I had to get creative on how I was going to watch these games.

It turned out I was in luck! The son of the teacher who lived at the end of my hallway watched hockey! All I had to do was convince him to watch the Vancouver games. Now, he seemed so old to me then...I'm thinking he was, oh, 24 at the most, but when you're 16...Anyway, long story short, many afternoons I could be found in their living room watching hockey while other students got help with school work in the dining room or made long distance phone calls from the phone in the kitchen.

It was a relief to get home not only have clear and easy access to the Canucks games, but also have a whole family (not to mention friends) who would cheer along with me! That I was a hockey fan was a source of great amusement to some of my boarding school friends. It just made me more Canadian than they already thought I was. One friend in particular tried to claim that since it is the NATIONAL Hockey League, all those Canadian teams, past and present, must actually belong to the USA. My counter - since Lord Stanley gave the Stanley Cup with instructions it should be presented to the top team in Canada, cities like New York, Boston, Detroit and Chicago must have ceded from the Union to join Canada.

No such bantering this year, but I'm happy to be in a hockey friendly place with people to cheer with me...and maybe, just maybe we'll have even more to cheer about than we did in 1994!