Why Canadian Hockey Fans Still Believe After 30 Years of Waiting
Because the Carolina Hurricanes won the Stanley Cup last week, I've been thinking about the Canadian Stanley Cup drought. Not the statistics. Not the higher taxes. Not the salary cap. Not any of the usual explanations that get tossed around every spring when another Canadian team falls short.
What I've been thinking about is something much simpler. Why do we keep coming back?
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It’s been three decades since a Canadian team won the Cup.
It's been more than 30 years since a Canadian team won the Stanley Cup. Think about that for a second. There are Canadian hockey fans who were born and are now raising families of their own who have never seen a Canadian franchise win it all.
And yet every October we start over. We buy the jerseys. We argue about the roster. We convince ourselves that this year might be different. It's actually kind of remarkable.
Living on Vancouver Island, I naturally found myself thinking about the Vancouver Canucks the other day. I remember 1994. I remember 2011. I remember how close they came. Close enough that you could almost reach out and touch it.
Then there are the Oilers. I first really became interested in hockey while teaching at the University of Alberta. The run in 2006. A couple of deep runs more recently. Close again and then again.
And of course, there are the Toronto Maple Leafs, the team I've covered for nine years. Their fans have their own version of the story. Every year begins with hope and ends with some variation of, "Well, maybe next year."
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Why don’t Canadian fans know better?
You'd think after thirty years we'd all know better. But apparently we don't. Or maybe that's not it at all.
Maybe the Stanley Cup isn't the reason most of us fell in love with hockey in the first place. I spent part of last week with my son in Edmonton. We talked about hockey. We talked about writing projects. We talked about plans for the future. Hockey found its way into the conversation more than once.
And it occurred to me that neither of us was talking about who won the Stanley Cup in 1993. We were talking about the game. The players. The stories. The memories.
That's the funny thing about being a hockey fan. The championship is the dream. It always will be. But the dream isn't really what keeps us coming back. It's the connection.
For Canadians, hockey brings us together.
It's watching a game with friends and family. It's the text message after a big goal. It's the debate over coffee the next morning. It's remembering players from twenty years ago as if they were old friends.
Maybe that's why the drought hasn't broken hockey in Canada. Because deep down, the Cup is far from being the whole story. The real story has always been the people we share it with.
The Cup would be wonderful. But until it comes home again, we'll do what Canadian hockey fans have been doing for three decades.
We'll show up. We'll cheer for our teams. And somehow, we'll keep believing.