In an interview before Stanley Cup game one in Las Vegas, TJ Oshie was asked if the Capitals could practice Vegas’s fast start to prepare. His answer touched on the game’s speed and unpredictable nature: “You can’t really emulate a game in practice like you would think you would be able to. The game is too fast, too physical to try to simulate in practice.”
His response got to the heart of something I noticed the first time I saw a hockey game. When things happen in hockey, they happen fast, without warning, and the only thing you can do is stay fully present and ready to adjust.
When you play hockey, you know things will change in unpredictable ways with uncommon speed. But when we live our lives, we often are led to believe that a plan can protect us, that we are mostly in control, that we can emulate and prepare, that we have our five-year increments to follow. People who believe this are football fans.
From the first moment of the first game I ever saw I was a hockey fan because its action unfolded the way my life has: a game plan out the window because of sudden and often painful circumstances, where adjustments required grace and intuition, and faith that the hockey gods would at least not work against me, even if they didn’t exactly seem to be helping. Strokes, cancer, heart attacks, job loss, divorce, death—affecting me or mine, out of the blue, a series of dizzying phone calls, each shifting my balance, forcing a play I had not anticipated.
Facing less, others have given up. Others are not hockey players.
Those who play balance on the edge, poised completely in the moment, whatever it happens to be and however unforeseen. They fall, they bounce up. They bleed; they do not care. They never stop moving until they step aside for teammates who have their own next shift to play.
Ernest Hemingway saw this grace under pressure in bullfighting. I see it most perfectly embodied among these ice warriors, who draw blood and spill their own, dodge their opponents or collide with them as the play demands, find balance amid a maelstrom that never stops.
People wonder why this particular Capitals team, after offseason upheaval, has made it to the finals where previous, more successful squads fell short. I do not. I have seen them all season flourish through disaster, turn adversity to their advantage, and persevere one period at a time. They stick to their game. They live in the moment. They thrive in uncertainty while certain they can handle whatever flies at them.
They believe. We believe. A city shifts.