In spite of growing up in a hockey crazed family, I only started watching the game about 10 years ago when I took up the sport, and I had to ask my husband why the rest of Canada hates the Canucks. His answer? The fans. This didn’t make much sense to me until the new neighbours spent most of the first period in tonight’s game assembling some large complicated wooden thing that required a good half hour of very heavy hammering. The urge to run downstairs and holler, with a wild look in my eyes, “It’s Game 2 of the Stanley Cup finals!!” was overwhelming. Fortunately I resisted, because it was, after all, only 5pm on a Saturday, and god knows a recent convert to the ukelele and mother of two children is prone to making her own noise, and hopefully they’ll be understanding when that time comes.

It was my first instance of nearly acting like a crazed fan, because this is my first experience cheering for a team in a Stanley Cup Final (the thing that I remember most about the ’94 run was thinking, imagine what kind of social change we could effect if we could only get out and riot in the same numbers), and good lord, it’s pretty exciting. My husband is an ex Montrealer who watched his team win 4 cups in a row, so maybe, like me, he’s not the best one to understand how it feels to have grown up with the disappointments of being a Canucks fan, or maybe this only makes their previous failure that much harder to take, I don’t know. I do know that I have friends (largely ex-Ontarians/Quebecers) who express that they hate Canucks fans – ergo, they hate me.

Whatever. Seriously. Hate me, and hate the place I live in, I don’t care. I put in my time suffering the freezing cold of Saskatchewan and it’s added to who I am, just as living in the west and raising my children here has. You can tell me we’re barely part of Canada and I won’t hold it against you, because I don’t care what you think. Cheering for the Canucks is just another thing that makes me feel a part of my community. If my team doesn’t make the playoffs I’ll root for whatever Canadian team is left (and hey, now we have one more to root for!). I do feel compelled to add, that regardless of where a team is from, that if you are going to hate the Canucks because there are some Swedes on the team or they’re not a national brand, then you are going to miss out on some thrilling, heart-stopping, awe-inspiring hockey.