Pregame Jitters – Hockey Wilderness

The Minnesota Wild are six days away from their first National Hockey League game since March 8. The world has changed at that time. The standard roster in the news has shifted to topics and figures that seemed impossible this time last year. Everything has slowed down to the hours we spent at home at the same time, accelerating as the news updates, sometimes hourly, seem like a crushing waterfall, overwhelming and endless. Linked to this was the fear and concern surrounding all facets of life, especially the strangers, returning to a sense of normality in the near future.

Since quarantine began in March, experts, researchers, and nearly everyone have spoken about the toll taken by the COVID-19 mental health pandemic. For the first time, mental health was a national concern and received the attention and discourse it deserved for far too long. Among the discussion (and the plethora of resources provided by the WHO, the CDC and other institutions) is the double-edged sword of sport factorization in the collective stress most people experience.

On the one hand, there is a desire for the sport to return. Since the 19th century, sports have been an escape opportunity to forget all the worries that come in them. Attending those early baseball games, filled with fights and wild runs, liberated the breaking socio-political problems of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In the second half of the century, baseball (after it had outgrown its rebellious phase) was a soothing escape with the hours spent on the fringe, more about relaxing with loved ones over overpriced beers and pushing questionable calls from the umpires . Hockey had a similar trajectory, but less about relaxation after the goon crew era. Watching hockey games, at home or in the arena, was about the adrenaline rush, cheering until you were hoarse. Forget all the worries and stress and erase it by the pure joy of frantically rooting your team to victory.

Sport has always provided that escape no matter what sport, country or era. After elections, national and natural disasters and senseless violence, sport has been the balm for a large part of society. In sport there is hope and despair, community and found family, companionship and rivalry, purpose and disrespect. Sport is the blueprint of humanity, the best and worst of our culture, wrapped up in just a few hours, uniting people unlike just about anything on Earth. They provide a source of inspiration for athletes (aspiring and pro) as well as spectators, regardless of the situation. They offer hope and a way forward when the path appears dark. And they often lead the way with cultural change, showing fans everywhere the steps that can be applied anywhere. Not only on the field, track, field or ice.

At a time when it felt like the world was slowly crumbling, sport disappeared within 24 hours, leaving many a gaping hole where they would have sought that escape, that hope, that relief. Anyone with an ounce of feeling knew the break was coming, but that didn’t make it less visceral when it happened. The falling dominoes of league after league announcing a suspension in the game felt like a nightmare of its own, somehow separated but intertwined in the pandemic’s waking nightmare. Within days, many on Twitter and other social media platforms fervently wished for sports for that escape, as the rising numbers coming from Europe hampered any possibility of a quick return to normal. Still, there were no live sports, and the absence deepened, painfully and sharply, as international tournaments including the 2020 Summer Olympics and UEFA Euro 2020 were postponed to 2021.

I was certainly one of those fans who wanted nothing more than to turn on the television and play a live hockey game or turn on a play-by-play radio from a spring training game. It felt wrong, shaking mentally every few days as if something was missing. And something used to be missing. The routine of tweeting several hockey games live per week, editing reruns of games for publication, and enjoying a long lunch while listening to the Cubs radio team sharing stories of Mesa during a Cactus League game, hyperventilating over the Raptors who defend their title. That was all missing. This season, I was also a billet parent for the local WHL team, so the routine at home of pre and post game meals, laughing at their real-life stories, the warm luck of seeing them grow into great young men , all of which disappeared within a few days of big league sports pushing the pause button. March was … fun to say the least.

I would have given just about anything to watch a live sports event. Repetitions were just the same, despite being given several nights a week during the regular season. Perhaps worst of all was the sudden, sharp revelation that a very, very large part of my daily schedule, of my life, and my emotional investment was based on sports. It was not an easy realization to sit on, especially if I couldn’t escape to a coffee shop or bookstore to get out of my head. There was a creeping horror, a fear that kept ringing in my head: what if sport never comes back?

That’s about the time when I no longer longed for sports to come back. In the past year, sport has been my job and my escape, in between my work here at SB Nation, being a hockey stick mom and curling up on highs after intensive physiotherapy sessions after knee surgery. The light bulb about my love mixed with obsession with hockey brought me some reflection that was really needed, but which I had constantly put off with excuses from the off season and when there was a quiet moment in the news cycle (good luck with that one).

During the first few months of quarantine, the lack of sports to fill my time led me back to my roots. Three hundred pages of fiction written between April and the end of June. Plan my cactus garden and slowly take shape in a corner of my front yard. Reading 26 books and a downright ridiculous amount of Captain America comics. I devoured the pile of foreign and domestic policy and political history books, lectures and podcasts I had put out for the off-season. (Top recommendations include Madeleine Albright’s memoir, Pod Save America, and Lovett or Leave It for podcasts, and Ronan Farrow’s War on Peace.) Yes, exercise was and still is a very big part of my life and my identity, but quarantine gave me the silver rim of recreating time for all other facets of who I am away from the sound of sticks and skates on the ice. And it was necessary.

In the past year, I had little bandwidth with little debilitating knee injury and two consecutive surgeries (the last and fortunately last just six weeks ago). It was far too easy to bury myself in hockey as a reprieve. Instead of escaping and distracting, writing about hockey, talking about hockey, watching hockey has always been pure and elated pleasure for me. I’m ready for hockey to come back, to cheer and moan and dive deep into analytics as the Wild faces Vancouver Canucks in the qualifying round. I’ll be ready in a minute.

But here’s the thing that the world isn’t ready for hockey to come back. And that is the other side of the double-edged sword of fear and anxiety around sports that we experience as a collective. As much as we all want to get back into sports, watch our favorite players have fun and make impossible games, we also want them to stay safe. Football has made a comeback in Europe and the UK. The number of positive cases for COVID-19 for those leagues across the league remains a fraction of the more than 40 positive results the NHL has achieved since early June. Part of that success is due to the changes the leagues have made to distance players when they are not on the pitch and to set strict distance waiver guidelines away from team facilities. The NHL’s guidelines for phase 3 look almost laughable by comparison, and the decision to enforce a bubble only in phase 4 is even more ridiculous.

It’s all too easy to forget that these fourth-line professional athletes, superstars and grinders are also people, with families and retirement plans and lives to enjoy away from the rink and long after the pandemic is gone. But again, it’s even easier to remember that players like it Luke Kunin (type 1 diabetes) and Steven Stamkos (history of blood clot concerns) lose the most from a risky, early return plan. The research around COVID-19 shows the problems and long-term concerns for people diagnosed with the virus who are recovering. Those who are disproportionately affected by the long-term problems are those with other health risks, such as diabetes, blood clots and asthma. Many players have expressed concerns about returning to play without a vaccine available. And in other leagues, we’ve seen reports of players choosing to sit out the 2020 shortened season to stay safe in hopes of a vaccine-backed, semi-normal 2021 season.

Other players have chosen to play and have expressed their reasoning for this. In the end, hockey players are just like us. They just want a sense of normality in what was frankly the strangest year yet. That decision and reasoning is valid and will hopefully be supported by those players who take all precautions to protect themselves, their loved ones and their teammates. And the players who choose to stay at home are just as valid in their decision. After all, we were all human beings, and each of us must deal as effectively as possible with the pandemic fear and anxiety.

For some, that’s excited to see hockey come back. For others, that’s a step away from sports, as a spectator or player, to play the long game and stay safe for future seasons. It’s totally okay to experience one or both as we see more footage of the Wild practicing in the coming days. It’s also okay to feel confused about your reaction to the return of hockey (and other top-class sports) amid the second wave of COVID-19 in the United States. And it’s okay to take care of yourself while experiencing all this uncertainty and worry, whether that’s by bingeing all the exhibition games like the first day of the Olympics, distracting yourself with something else (like gardening or binging The Last Dance on Netflix), or talk it all over with the people you love. This is an extraordinary moment in human history, and I have no doubt that we will see it on the other side. In the meantime, those pregame jitters you feel are normal. They all felt. It means they were human. And one day, hopefully in the not too distant future, when we were able to pack safely in ice rinks for games, we can now look back and cherish the sports we love all the more because we endured this.