I once read a fic so good that it changed my brain chemistry after I had accidentally clicked on the wrong tag and the summary looked appealing to me and ever since then I have become a hockey enthusiast (this was last year)
how did YOU 🫵🏽 get into hockey? would love to know your journey!!
thank you! beautiful accidents of fate intervening...
right. the short answer is like. ok. you know how in the song ‘slow show’ by the national matt berninger sings ‘you know i dreamed about you / for twenty-nine years before i saw you’? that’s kind of how i feel. about ice hockey.
longer and incredibly self indulgent answer:
knew ice hockey existed because i used to figure skate as a kid and the rink i went to had a local team (not EIHL) but at that time i did not care.
used tumblr a lot as a teenager and had mutuals who were Very into tyler seguin (as a star, so must have been circa 2013?) and also the penguins. this planted the seed that hockey was an interest a person who was otherwise interesting and cool to me could have but it didn’t fully infect me at this stage.
friend recommended the webcomic check please! which is set in the world of NCAA hockey. i liked it, but my brain mostly latched onto a minor side character who is in the NHL (for proof see the early days of this blog) and i liked to read fics written by writers with a background in hrpf who made the games sound super interesting.
spent a few days with a person very dear to me in hospice care that happened to coincide with the 2014 sochi olympics, so i ended up watching (muted) hockey for hours and hours on end. sorry to include this detail because it’s sad but it was comforting at a really hard time.
i don’t remember why but i got really into the 2018-2019 (?) toronto maple leafs in the midst of having a nightmare finishing my degree. this may be regarded as a bad move from our privileged modern vantage point but we must remember that at the time i simply didn’t know any better. consequences included my lifelong and still-unshaken attachment to mitch marner and auston matthews. had no reliable way of watching games because i was too broke for a streaming pass and too nervous to Get In Trouble torrenting/pirating stuff via uni accommodation wifi but i followed the headlines and watched highlights and wished them well to absolutely no avail. also did not complete my degree that year.
binge-watched letterkenny. this isn’t the same as watching hockey but there are hockey players in it.
2020-2025 there was very little hockey in my life which was sad and sucked. had some personal stuff happening that was also sad and sucked. finished my degree finally. wanted hockey but didn't look into how to get to it. read a fair amount of hrpf-style check please fic. was excited last year for the buzz around heated rivalry because there was finally going to be a way to see more hockey and let me tell you. if you have not seen that show. it is many things but it is not a source of hockey.
finally had a lightbulb moment in like december that i’m capable of seeking out good things in my life that make me happy rather than passively sitting around feeling sad that joy hasn't presented itself to me. so i started going out of my way to actually… watch hockey like i had been wanting to do for ages (alongside some other life changes). and it was great! watched and read and listened to so much i feel like i’ve crammed my brain full of knowledge and opinions i could only have dreamt of before. it's like the comparison that vets make that dog years aren't the same as human years. i've been living in hockey years for the last few months which is why i'm in so deep when chronologically it has technically not been a super long time.
so i guess the short version of the long version is hyperfixation. and a lot of love
