Hocktober

In case you were wondering, the answer is yes.

Finally, finally, finally, the question that hockey fans have been asking since June (or, in the case of us unfortunate Rangers fans, since that cursed Sunday in April) can be met with the affirmative: Yes!

Is it October yet? We asked in July. Is it October yet? We asked again in August. Is it October yet? We asked yet again in September. So…Is it October yet?

Why, yes. Yes it is.

And it could not have come soon enough. Personally, I am not what you’d call a summer person. I hate the beach. I hate the heat. I miss hockey. I hate the sun. I hate the way my brain seems to melt like the copious amount of ice cream that I eat year-round anyway. I miss hockey. I hate the lethargy. And did I mention that I miss hockey?

Even throughout the longest, hottest summer in recent memory, we did get to bear witness to several dramatic, NHL-related events: There was the Kovalchuk Krisis, the Great Purge of the Chicago Blackhawks, the banishment of @PaulBizNasty from Twitter, and the triumphant return of BizNasty in the form of @BizNasty2point0. (If you’re not following him, you should get on that, stat…and if you don’t have a Twitter, don’t worry, you’ll cave in eventually.) For us Rangers fans, there was the typical Glen Sather Exorbitant Free Agent Signing of the Summer in Derek Boogaard, whose dollars-per-point ratio would probably put my entire college tuition to shame.

But in all honesty, I only really care about how many zeroes are on Kovalchuk’s contract if it causes the impending Apocalypse (aka: an NHL lockout). Frankly, I find BizNasty and his industrious campaign to butcher the English language to be offensive and tiresome. And as for Sather’s latest off-season splurge: if Boogaard scares the BizNasty out of everyone and prevents Marion Gaborik from taking (another) beating…Well, I think I just may be able to deal with that.

There are some fans that thrive in the frenzied off-season. And while I enjoy going cross-eyed from reading about free agency signings all day on July 1st as much as the next hockey fan, I can’t help but miss MY team.

Like many Rangers fans, I was born into this mess. My father bought season tickets right out of college, and he’s owned them till this very day. (Or, at least, until I convinced him recently that I’d be attending more games than he would this year, and that I should probably just keep the tickets in my dorm room…for convenience sake, ya know?) But it was only after my first playoff game at the Garden that I transformed from a Rangers fan into a Blueshirts fanatic.

I can’t recall the exact chain of events that led me to that game, but I remember worrying that, by the second overtime period, my grandfather was going to go into cardiac arrest. I don’t remember who scored during regulation time, but I remember precisely where Michal Roszival was located when his slap shot bulleted by Ryan Miller in 16:43 of double overtime. And while I remember quite clearly the feeling I had when the crowd at Madison Square Garden leapt to their feet in unison and roared their celebration of that goal, there are absolutely no words in the English language to describe it.

And that’s when I realized I was hooked for life.

I studied abroad last year, and I really did miss home. (By “home”, you know I mean MSG, right? Glad we’re on the same page.) Over the summer, I had to walk past MSG every other day in order to get to my internship. Inevitably, I would end up standing in front of the big “MADISON SQUARE GARDEN” sign above Penn Station, just staring at the massive, cylindrically shaped building in front of me, physically swelling with a mixture of pride and nostalgia. (Or was it the 105 degree heat? )

We’re coming off an unbelievably frustrating hockey season. I doubt I need to go into detail about the reason the Rangers’ season was cut mercilessly short last year, because you’re probably still reliving that moment in your nightmares. (And then there was Sidney Crosby’s, um, moment in Vancouver, which never ceases to make me want to hurl something out of my window.) If summer is good for anything, it simultaneously dulls our feelings about the previous season, which in turn fosters our excitement for the upcoming one.

And so, hockey season is finally upon us. It’s all very overwhelming at first: Summer rolls on forever and ever, and then BAM- there are three, four, five NHL games a night, the “Players-To-Watch” list includes every single new/old/prepubescent player on the Rangers’ roster, and I’m just so excited to see my red, white, and blue out on the ice that I can barely register that there’s actually a hockey game going on right in front of me. And that’s only the pre-season.

As a relatively new fan, I’ve been praying for some of the Hartford kids to make the jump to the big leagues this year so that I can personally watch them grow and develop, instead of relying on other fans’ biases towards certain players who have been around for longer. As if in answer to my prayers, Sather’s new strategy of addition by subtraction (bye bye, Wade Redden!) seems to be opening up the roster for some new, young, Blue blood.

Even so, this team still presents itself as one huge question mark. That Henrik Lundqvist and Ryan Callahan will give 110% each and every game is a given. Alexander Frolov and Marion Gaborik seem to play well together, but will they become the goal-scoring powerhouse that we expect them to become? Will Marty Biron prove to be a reliable back-up goaltender and not just a pretty cool guy? Will Artem Anisimov have a breakout season, or end up wasting away on the fourth line or in Hartford? And although he’ll be starting the season in Hartford (much to the chagrin of many female Rangers’ fans), will Mats Zuccarello-Aasen soon show us some of his hobbit-like tricks… and is he distantly related to a certain ex-Ranger out in Phoenix?

Maybe we’ll find out the answers to these questions in the next month, or the next season, or never. As Rangers’ fans, we’re used to soul-crushing frustration.

But, hey: We’re being positive, right?

Game on, Rangers. Let’s see what you’ve got.

(In the meantime, I’d like to extend my gleeful, slightly fangirlish thanks to Kerri, Kristen, and Christina for the invitation to join this awesome (!!!) blog. Looking forward to an exciting season!)