I once told Chris! from Covered In Oil that when the playoffs were over I’d give him the explanation I felt I owed him for the meltdowns I had every round (especially the Finals). My only issue was how to phrase it, how to put things into terms that people who don’t know me can understand–kind of like a “don’t let the surface blind you to what lies beneath” sort of thing. So I let this post sit and ferment in a cool dry corner of my mind before decanting it for those six or seven of y’all that are still with me after the insanity that was the 2006 playoffs.

Pardon any lingering sediment. This is also a little involved, but trust me, there is a point.

Fred Shero once said, “We know that hockey is where we live, where we can best meet and overcome pain and wrong and death. Life is just a place where we spend time between games.”

It’s so very true, especially for me. I touched on it a little in my post about finally getting to lay hands on the Cup. Hockey’s fun, no doubt. It’s always a lot of fun, it’s always a great time, and I’ve met so many wonderful people and made several very good friends because of it. But for me, hockey is so much more than that. It’s more than a way for me to express my belief system, it’s more than social time, it’s more than something that’s gotten me and my sister talking again.

Hockey is where–and how–I finally managed to find myself.

The 2006 playoffs were a personal αποκαλυψις for me, a personal bloodletting. Da Chief was right when he said that my posts during the playoffs read like a personal catharsis, because that’s about what they were (though I didn’t fully realize it at the time). It just felt to me like things had to happen the way they did, like it needed to go down the way that it went down–because my life has never been easy all the way through. When the Oilers swatted down the Wings, it resonated with me as a personal allegory; Yeah, I was still carrying some lingering hate from 2002, but in the grand scheme of things it was like that series was kinda like the Universe letting me know that I had bigger fish to fry. I would have to face and finally deal with all the old personal baggage I’d been carrying around for nigh on 30 years, and finally close that circle and get that burden off my shoulders if I wanted to become a whole person and finally move forward with my life.

Thus, my scattered comments (and an old post) about the “Unity of Rings”–the idea that what starts in one place ends in the same place, with a hefty dash of “what goes around comes around”.

“I know the pieces fit cos I watched them fall away”, in other words.

I can talk about hockey on a technical, statisical, geeky level when I’m so moved, but for me the ritualized warfare that is hockey is something that I just plain “get”, something that I understand on a very visceral, very emotional, very spiritual level. It’s something that I just know, and sometimes it’s hard for me to put it into concrete terms that the vast majority of folks can relate to.

I mean, if your gut told you that something bad was about to happen in the convenience store you’re shopping in courtesy of the shifty-eyed looking dude that just walked in with a curiously-bulging coat, and that you need to GTFO before you wind up with a nine-gram migraine, how do you explain that to the clerk without looking like a complete raving nutter?

The superstitions, the meltdowns, all that stuff was–is–more or less window-dressing. It was my blue blankie that was really more formality than safety-net. The Forms Must Be Obeyed.

When the Warchief lifted the Cup, it was like I’d finally reached my perfect moment of clarity, where I realized that I could finally shut the door on the past and everything that I was allowing to drag me down, and just let it stay in the past while I finally move the hell forward with my life. What I felt was relief, more than anything. Now it’s like I’m steadily putting all the pieces back together–sure, there are some bumps in the road; but I finally feel like I’m really fully in charge of myself now, much like the Hurricanes are finally fully in charge of themselves and their destinies and not held down or held back by the ghost of Whalercanes past.

I really can’t say I have the hate–the cold, life-draining, soul-burning, distracting, I hate you plz die kkthx, withering hate–that I used to have for some other teams…and I never really realized it until I watched the Hurricanes championship DVD the other day. I may not care for some fans of certain teams, and there may be particular players that I loathe for some reason, but on the whole the way I now feel toward the teams themselves is “Nothing personal, ’s just hockey.”

The paradigm has officially shifted, and it feels pretty damn liberating.

There’s your explanation, Chris. Hope it made some sense.