The Good Old Hockey game.

Hockey is not a sport I grew up with. I vaguely remember snippets of the game being televised on a black and white television in the three room, third floor flat of our four story building in the city of Szczecin, Poland. That was the mid 1960's and our TV was probably one of only three or four in the entire building. I can not say that the males of our household, my grandfather and uncle, were hockey fans either. It would have been hard to be a fan when the games were seldom shown in their entirety and, only focused on Soviet teams. I can be fairy certain that no one, at that time, felt any affinity toward a hockey team with the Hammer and Sickle emblazoned on their jersey. We lived in state run home cooperatives,worked for state run institutions, stood in queues for food at state run shops and gazed at the likeness of Lenin on every other street corner. We watched the one channel that came in clearly enough most nights, and if hockey happened to be what was was being shown then we watched it.

Things changed drastically in 1970 when my mother and I arrived in Canada. Come winter, hockey was the subject of conversation in school, at work, in coffee shops and around family kitchen tables. Children and adults wore their favourite team colours with pride and youngsters engaged in impromptu games on side streets and empty parking lots. The message could not have been clearer. If you wanted to be Canadian you had to know, and better yet, love hockey. I still remember sitting in a crowded school gymnasium and watching a game of the Canada/Russia series with the nuns casting a nervous eye at the television between shooshing boisterous children.

It wasn't till I met my husband-to-be that I got a good appreciation of what it meant to be a hockey fan. His entire family considered the Toronto Maple Leafs theirs to cajole, correct, reprimand and cheer whenever the occasion arose. And, it arose at least twice a week every year, between October and June. Every single member of the family had an opinion as to what every line was doing wrong and how they should do it better and in the event a goal was scored, they announced with a whoop and a solid thump of the foot to the floor that that's the way games got won.

The Maple Leafs have had their ups and downs over the last thirty years but I must admit there is something anticipatory about welcoming a new hockey season and wondering if this is the year it will all go our way. This year things are looking better than they have in a very long time. I may just have another reason to look forward to the cold weather from now on. Come on Maple Leafs, make us proud!