My Thoughts on Hockey

From time to time, people ask me why I love hockey so much. The easy answer is that I enjoy the game. I love the speed, the skill, the strategy, the physicality, and the fact that anything can happen until the final horn sounds. But if I’m being honest, I don’t think that’s really why I keep coming back. The older I get, the more I think hockey has become about something much bigger than the game itself. Somewhere along the way, it started teaching me some of the most important things I’ve learned about life.

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One of the most common sayings in hockey is that it’s all about the guy on your left and the guy on your right. For a long time, I thought that was just another hockey cliché, but now I think it’s one of the truest things ever said about the sport.

Hockey is one of those games where nobody succeeds alone. A forward depends on his defensemen. A defenseman depends on his goalie. A goalie depends on the five players in front of him. Everyone is relying on someone else, and everyone is sacrificing for someone else. A forward blocks a shot and breaks his foot. A defenseman takes a hit to keep a play alive. A goalie stands on his head for sixty minutes and still gets blamed for the one puck that somehow found its way through. Everybody suffers, everybody sacrifices, and everybody trusts.

That’s why I don’t think the best teams are ever really about talent alone. They’re about trust. They’re about believing that when you make a mistake, somebody behind you is going to help clean it up. They’re about knowing the people around you are willing to sacrifice for something bigger than themselves. And I think life works the same way. Nobody gets through it alone. The people who pick us up when we fall matter. The people who forgive us when we screw up matter. The people who stay when things get difficult matter.

At the end of the day, hockey isn’t really about the puck or the goals. It’s about people.

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Another thing hockey has taught me is that every shift starts at zero.

You can have the worst shift of your life. You can turn the puck over, get scored on, make a mistake that twenty thousand people in the arena see happen in real time, and then a few minutes later the coach taps you on the shoulder and sends you right back out there. The game doesn’t stop because you had a bad shift, and I’ve learned that life doesn’t either.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about that. No matter how bad yesterday was, the next shift is coming. No matter how many mistakes you’ve made, the next shift is coming. No matter how badly things feel like they’re falling apart, the next shift is coming. You don’t always get to undo what happened on the last one. You don’t get to take back the turnover or erase the goal against. At some point, you just have to decide what you’re going to do with the next opportunity you get.

And I think that’s what matters. The question isn’t whether another opportunity will come. The question is whether you’ll be brave enough to step back onto the ice when it does.

That’s one of the reasons hockey resonates with me so much. It reminds me that failure isn’t the end of the story. Sometimes all you can do is keep skating, keep showing up, and take the next shift.

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But if I’m being completely honest, I think the reason hockey means so much to me personally is something deeper than all of that. Hockey gives me something I’ve struggled to find in a lot of other places. It gives me a sense of belonging.

I’ve spent a lot of my life feeling like I don’t quite fit in. Like I’m standing just outside the circle looking in. It’s hard to explain sometimes, because you don’t have to be physically alone to feel alone. You can be surrounded by people and still feel disconnected. You can be part of a group and still somehow feel like everybody else belongs to it more than you do.

Hockey feels different.

For sixty minutes, eighty-two games a year (longer if my team makes the playoffs) I belong.

When the Canadiens score, thousands of people I’ve never met celebrate at the exact same moment I do. When they lose, thousands of people feel the same disappointment. When overtime starts, thousands of us are holding our breath together.

There’s the kid watching his first game, the lifelong fan who has been watching for decades, the person sitting alone on their couch after a terrible day, the family gathered around the television, the fan watching from another country. Most of us will never meet each other, but for a few hours we’re connected by the same team and the same hope.

And I personally think there’s something really beautiful about that. For a little while, nobody has to feel completely alone. For a little while, we’re all pulling in the same direction. For a little while, we all belong to something bigger than ourselves.

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People sometimes say, “It’s just a game.”

Maybe they’re right. Maybe it is. But I think games can become more than just games. They become traditions. They become memories. They become communities. They become the jersey somebody has owned for twenty years, the arena a kid walks into for the first time and remembers for the rest of his life, the phone call after the final horn, the friends who never would have met if they hadn’t loved the same team.

They become places where people find connection. They become places where people find hope. And sometimes they become places where people finally feel like they belong.

Hockey has been that place for me. It has taught me about trust, sacrifice, perseverance, community, and showing up when life gets hard. It has taught me that sometimes you can do everything right and still lose. Sometimes the puck just doesn’t bounce your way. Sometimes you have a terrible night. And then you come back and play again.

Maybe most importantly, it has taught me that none of us are meant to do this alone.

So when people ask me what hockey is really about, I think my answer is pretty simple. It’s about fighting for something bigger than yourself alongside people you trust. It’s about knowing somebody has your back and making damn sure they know you have theirs. It’s about getting back up after a bad shift. It’s about finding people to celebrate with when things are good and people who stay when they aren’t. It’s about finding a place where you belong.

The goals are great. The wins are great. The Stanley Cup is fucking great.

But when it’s all said and done, my thoughts on hockey really come down to this: it’s all about each other.

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