Luke is having a day off. This is not because Luke has had enough — Luke is a professional and professionals do not have enough — but because the house has been so comprehensively unpleasant about its lathe and plaster shenanigans that a strategic retreat became necessary before he exhausted his entire vocabulary of swear words and had nothing left for future jobs.
Yesterday, in addition to the walls defeating him at every turn, we also had no internet. Not in a dramatic way. In the specific, vindictive way that old houses and earnest electricians can produce between them — a quiet, total absence of connectivity that arrived without announcement and declined to leave until it was good and ready. We responded the only way available: hotspotting determinedly from our phones, in the crouched-over-a-device posture of people who will not be beaten by their own infrastructure.
The house is winning. I respect the commitment even as I resent it.
Now. Hockey.
I am a hockey girl to my bones. This is not seasonal, not occasional — it is a fundamental character trait that predates most of my other personality features. Every year, even when my team isn’t in the running, I can find something to attach to in the playoffs. A goalie. A story. A team doing something unexpected. I am not a difficult hockey fan to satisfy.
This year has vexed me.
The good news: no Florida teams. I am taking this as a personal gift from the hockey gods.
The bad news: Vegas. Again. Has Vegas missed a playoffs since they started? I cannot be bothered to look it up because it doesn’t feel like they have, and confirming it will only make me more annoyed than I already am. Every other expansion team has had their years of being authentically terrible at hockey in the way of new teams finding their feet. Vegas just turned up and started performing and the rest of us have been processing this injustice ever since.
Last year I had Bob. Sergei Bobrovsky, for those not fluent in goalie nickname. All hockey girls have a soft spot for goalies — this is not a choice, it is simply how we are wired. Bob gave me something last year. This year I cannot even go there.
The best I can do — quietly, and I will deny it if directly confronted — is hope the Habs win. Don’t tell anyone. They are Canadian, and Canadian is the bar I am working with this year, and I am not too proud to work with it.
Hockey is dead to me this year.
That said.
I have also just joined the AIHL viewing network. The Australian Ice Hockey League runs in a completely different season to the NHL — which means that rather than having hockey from October to May and then staring into the void for the remaining months, I now have the theoretical capacity for hockey twelve months of the year. This is either the most sensible thing I have done recently or a harbinger of something my optometrist is going to have opinions about.
Either way: hockey. Always hockey. The big boys can vex me all they like. I have contingencies. 🏒🖤
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