pretending

I make a foray into sports journalism.

I woke up at 4AM to watch the Montreal Canadiens edge the Buffalo Sabres in a 3-2 overtime win, guaranteeing them a spot in the Eastern Conference Finals of the Stanley Cup playoffs, where they would face the Carolina Hurricanes. Passed to Montreal forward Alex Newhook, the puck glanced off his stick and grazed Sabres netminder Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen's outstretched glove, but I didn't know it had gone in until the Canadiens near the net each raised their hands in exhausted victory. The entire team huddled in a jittery embrace beneath the birds-eye-view camera, like a cluster of just-fed koi.

I could've watched the game after the fact, at a sane time of day. But watching those is like watching a prerecorded church service. The attendant holy spirit is long gone.

Like a church service, watching a game live through a screen still doesn't compare to watching in person.

Months ago, I had been sitting in Lenovo Center, watching the Carolina Hurricanes stymie the visiting Pittsburgh Penguins over the course of forty minutes. Having recently lost their franchise stars to an injury and a suspension (which was why the ticket prices had plummeted nearly overnight), the Penguins played with grim desperation.

The puck had a nearly unreal weight to it. On the screen, it only takes up a handful of pixels, sometimes flickering and disappearing altogether. On the TV, its click-clacking off of sticks, skates, and walls sounds tinny and inconsequential. But in life, almost every play is accompanied by a noise not unlike a pistol going off, itself accompanied by an echo through the clammy air.

I felt only a little like an obnoxious snowbird as the disjointed Penguins finally woke up in the last period, overcoming a two-goal deficit in the last two minutes to force overtime, then a shootout. My heart filled with the petty joy exclusive to fans of obvious underdogs. The Hurricanes fans around me complained (as Hurricanes fans are wont to do). It must've been close to 10PM on a weekday—I had expected to be home by then. But the Penguins did not disappoint: they proceeded to lose the shootout, much like they had been doing all seasonAt that point in time, their record in shootouts was 10 losses, 1 win..

On the way back to my apartment, the Uber driver (who had also been watching the Carolina-Pittsburgh game) remarked into the rearview mirror: man, you gotta feel bad for Buffalo. Then, he spent the next fifteen minutes trying to convince me that the recent US military operations in Iran were a good thing.

I found it hard to feel bad for Buffalo.

The year in which I started to pay attention to professional hockey was the year they broke their 14-year-long playoff drought—that is, this year—the longest such drought in the history of the league.This sparkling title now goes to the Detroit Red Wings, at 10 seasons. But they had done more than break their drought. They had far exceeded all expectations, emerged as the best in their division, and were having the sort of season you hear being described as Cinderella. They were a far cry from the bottom-feeders that NHL star Jack Eichel had famously washed his hands of, after they refused to sign off on the surgery that saved his career.

So the only Buffalo I ever knew were not chastened by their lean years. Instead, they seemed to me purely brilliant, cruel, and out for blood. It seemed as though it had always been that way, ever since their inception in 1970.

They did not seem long-suffering to me, only long-suffered, or maybe it was that their past suffering had honed them into a fleet of supersoldiers, whereas the Canadiens, while good, seemed sometimes inconsistent, too greenMaybe unfair of me to view them this way, since the Sabres are also young and hot-headed., the fact that blood ran under their skin too obvious.

When they finally fell to the Canadiens after more than an hour of regulation time, more than three hours in real time, it was like waking up from a strange dream. Not a nightmare, but a dream in which everything is only slightly off, where the fear is more uneasiness, and the uneasiness is more lead poisoning than electric shock.

I watched Luukkonen, drenched with sweat, throw his helmet somewhere off-camera. He curled his lip in disgust. The other Sabres, in their vibrant home blues, stared holes into the floor.

For them, too, the dream was over; the buffalo slain.