#156. Return of the NHL Playoffs (Friday, April 21, 2006)

What was your best day…of living what felt like several nights in the span of a night?

It had been nearly two years since the last time a puck dropped for an NHL postseason game. Two years of intense labor battles, sports deprivation from coast to coast, and an Ottawa Senators peak championship window that never materialized. But now on this night, it was finally back.

The first round of the NHL is perhaps only comparable to the first round of March Madness in its sheer excitement and density of competitive sports action (the general absence of “competitive” for the NBA is why it doesn’t count). And on this night, there were four matchups to open the coming two months’ epic journey toward the 2006 Stanley Cup.

The most interesting part of this story, though, is that I did not race home excitedly this Friday in anticipation of a full night of hockey. In fact, I didn’t race home at all. Nor even get home at a reasonable hour. We had a full four-hour Friday after-school work session, as usual, at the space simulation club. During which I must have continued implementing my Dewey Decimal system for our storage facilities (#98), helped clean up from the chaotic weeklong mission to Titan a few weeks before, and eat my second Subway Italian BMT of the week (#113) while hearing Nigel Healey (#13) and Jake Carter (#51) recount a long series of anecdotes from one of the giant encyclopedia-like books they were lugging around at that time (in intense preparation for Reach provincials, which I had helped the A-team—which didn’t include me, #11—qualify for and we thought we had a legit shot to win, #11).¹

(Point is, I don’t actually recall exactly what happened. But based on the date, I can infer all that with pretty high confidence. It was a rich period of my teenage life.)

But when I go arrive home (after an hour-long bus trip) at nine at night, I become fully engrossed in the hockey that is going on—flipping wildly between the channels where at least two or three games were going on simultaneously. I watched the heavy underdog Oilers blow a late third-period lead to the 124-point first seed Red Wings, and lose in double overtime to a fluke shot by grinder Kirk Maltby² I watched the Predators hold off a wild last second flurry by the visiting Sharks, in front of one of the most intense-looking home crowds I’d ever seen, to win their game by one goal. I watched the Flames and Mighty Ducks start their game, with the last-minute shock announcement that 2003 playoff MVP Jean-Sebastien Giguere was out with an injury.³ I even flipped intermittently to the Jays game⁴, where I saw bits and pieces of an extra-inning rally that ended with them walking off the Red Sox.

But amid all those unnecessary details about teams I don’t care about normally, the wildest thing is that my favorite team the Ottawa Senators—who were entering the playoffs also as a first-seed and heavy favorite—also played that night. And won, with a third-period comeback. And, somehow, that was the part I took the least care in remembering.

I mean, we have evidence of me being a crappy Senators fan (#42). But this wasn’t that. It was more that some part of my brain was not active the way a brain is normally active that night. I felt it. It was like that the whole night had this weird, mundane, never-ending aura about it, like in my mind the metaphysics of time had compressed three days of average, inconsequential events… of one day of (even more) average, inconsequential events.

But if you were to find a time in life where even average, inconsequential events would be worth it, then the Spring of 2006 would be as good as any.

As it turns out, we did have a legit shot. As noted in #10, we finished second in the round-robin and got upset by 10 points in the first-round by our ninth-seed rivals from University of Toronto School who ended up placing second nationally.
With that, I thought they had also any chance they had for an upset. But they ended up beating the Red Wings in six games, and making it all the way to Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals.
And was replaced by the little-known (at the time) Ilya Bryzgalov, who ended up going on a historic run of his own that playoffs, before becoming a household goaltending name.
Just to add to the texture of everything, their prized free agent acquisition A.J. Burnett had to leave his start early due to injury and was sidelined for two months.