there's something kind of you-can't-go-home-again about being a hockey fan in terms of, like, your "first" roster is always going to be "your" roster, no matter how long ago it was or how many people have been swapped around, how many trades, how many retirements, how many free agencies you live through. it'll never be exactly like that again. it probably wasn't even exactly like that for a full season. i know there's a lot of jokes about "how do athletes deal with trades. what about their friends?" but it's also, like, what about us? what about our friends? to me, the penguins are always going to be, like, brian boyle and jason zucker and brian dumoulin and evan rodrigues and john marino, but for other people, the penguins go back even further than that. hags and horny and nealer and flower. you don't have to go too far down on reddit to find people who think about mario and jagr. i was a fairweather bandwagon fan for the avs when they won the cup and that exact lineup holds its shape in my mind perfectly, but talk to someone who follows the team for real and they have a tyson jost-shaped hole in their picture of the cup team that's still not healed over. i just love that. the inherent melancholia of being a sports fan is not knowing you're in the good ol' days when you're in them and then trade deadline comes. and the trade deadline comes every year.
