Last night was the last Caps home game of the season. It didn't put me in the funk that the end of the season usually does. Last year I speculated that baseball was all I needed to get me over hockey, and it does help to have a distraction to bridge that April-to-October gap. But last night I realized that I just don't have the same emotional investment in the team, and I won't be getting it back.
It struck me when the crowd...well, some of the crowd, but still, it shoudn't have been any of the crowd...booed Peter Bondra.
There's just no reason to boo Peter Bondra. It pissed me off that people were booing Peter Bondra. I still have an emotional investment in Peter Bondra.
That's because Bondra started playing for the Caps in 1990, when my seats were behind the bench and I hung around the press room with my dad after the games. I met players back then, and I saw up close how they acted during games.
Except for Kolzig, there are no players on the Capitals now that I've ever met. I'm sure they are fine young men, and I'm impressed with a lot of what they did this year. (And it goes without saying that I like Alex Ovechkin, right?) I was happy Pettinger got his 20 goals, and I hope Brian Willsie can hit his 20th tonight.
What I saw this year wasn't as awful as I'd feared, and I think Ted has a nice young team that should mature into a really good team. I look forward to watching them, and I'd never not root for Washington...I'm as steadfast a homer as you can get. But now hockey is like football and baseball and the Caps are like the Redskins and the Nationals.
Which is why, I suppose, it was no big deal to walk out of the arena last night. On the way home we talked about what to take for tailgating at the baseball game on Saturday.
Posted by Nic at April 18, 2006 04:29 PM | TrackBack