Anyone who reads this blog regularly knows I’ve been a hockey fan my whole life. Not only have I been a fan, but my hockey fandom is one of the few constants in my life that has always been a positive – it’s something no one ever made fun of me for, no one ever tried to discourage me from, and something that I’ve held on to through three states which has always managed to win people over. The three cities I’ve lived in are all NHL cities, with Seattle having received the Kraken. All three also have prominent minor league affiliations: There aren’t any minor league teams in Buffalo, but nearby Rochester has the AHL’s Americans, who are considerably older than their parent club. Chicago has the competitive Chicago Wolves, who the city’s hockey fans turned to once the nadir of the Wirtz years hit and people got disillusioned. And Seattle has TWO WHL teams, the Seattle Thunderbirds and the Everett Silvertips. All of those teams receive significant local sports coverage, have diehard fans, and are staples of their local communities.
Following hockey of course means tuning in for the playoffs and the Stanley Cup Final once the end of the season rolls around, regardless of who’s in them. Unfortunately, the NHL postseason this past season was rather disappointing. There were some nice surprises; the most hotly contested first round was between the Panthers and Lightning while the Hurricanes and Predators also played a hard series. But in an unusual twist for the NHL, a lot of things went by the book: The Islanders dispatched the Penguins in short order, Boston beat Washington, Edmonton and St Louis proved themselves frauds, and Montreal took their free first round win against the gagged Leafs. While the Canadiens’ Conference Final victory over the Knights gave everyone a little bit of pause for thought, it ultimately meant nothing in the grand scheme of things. Montreal’s first time in the big dance since 1993 pit them against the mammoth steamroller from Tampa, and the Habs never stood a chance. They saved face by winning game three, but other than that, the predictable occurred and the Bolts were only on the ice just long enough to pick up the Stanley Cup again. Even the storyline was bad; the Montreal Canadiens are the most storied team in the NHL. They’ve won the Stanley Cup more often than any other team. Even though their most recent victory was in 1993, no one felt bad enough for them to cheer for them. And the Tampa Bay Lightning have been one of the best teams in history for the last four years. They won the Stanley Cup the year before and are a dynasty in the making. I actually had a lot more fun watching the NBA playoffs and seeing the Milwaukee Bucks play against the Phoenix Suns in the Finals. Usually, the NBA is the beacon of predictability while the NHL eats brackets like popcorn.
My indifference toward the teams, however, didn’t keep me from enjoying the Stanley Cup Final. It certainly didn’t prevent me from Tweeting occasional awkward, random thoughts about it. I have no delusions about how far my “influence” stretches on social media. I don’t have very many followers on Twitter, I use a pseudonym, and my Facebook account is private. So usually my Tweets tumble along into their rightful place into the vast internet void, likely to never be seen again. That seemed to be the fate of everything I Tweeted about the Stanley Cup Final, but I was okay with that, so I sent off a small handful of fun messages that were under 240 characters. Hockey fans noticed SOME of them, and the few that did didn’t react to them.
One of the fans that took note of my Tweets, though, was The Stanley Cup.
Yes, the Stanley Cup has an official Twitter account. It’s certified, which means it even has one of those little checkmarks next to it. (“If you want me, you’ll have to work for it.”) It’s affiliated with the NHL itself. And I’ve been following it for a long time. And this year, it was spearheading a very unique and fun little promotion for the league. The NHL chose to acknowledge the fans that helped turn the league into a global brand and thank us in a campaign called Stanley Tweets. When a hockey team wins the Stanley Cup, the names of the players and staff from the winning team get engraved into the side of the Cup. 52 names get engraved every year, and to sync up with that, the league decided to pick 52 Tweets from fans and engraved them on a silver plaque in the Hockey Hall of Fame. I’m a somewhat casual Twitter user and didn’t have any idea this was going on, which was why I was pleasantly shocked at an email that turned up in July.
One of my hastily-shot off Tweets from the Final had been spotted by the league. It was picked to be enshrined in the Hockey Hall of Fame, and the email was from the league’s social media coordinator, Neil Tennant. He congratulated me, let me know that my Tweet was going to be embossed in the Hall, and asked me to sign a virtual release form. To say I wasn’t expecting this would be an understatement. If anything, I was skeptical. Guy reading Tweets from my account? Asking for personal information? Yeah, I had a few red flags go up, so I spent several days in diligent research mode. I looked up the campaign itself, which checked out on every legitimate hockey source that reported it, up to and including the NHL website. I looked up the email address because there’s no being too careful, and learned that it was right from the NHL itself. I looked up the name and checked out the Linkedin profile. EVERYTHING checked out.
The next trick was getting the release form back to him. I have a new computer which uses Windows 10, which isn’t an operating system that I’m used to. So instead of just filling out the form and sending it back, I had to learn a convoluted process of downloading it, converting it into a different kind of file, getting it onto a picture, and running the picture through a cheap, bad online editor since I don’t have a good one yet. A couple of the lines I wrote on were rather thick and colorful, but Mr. Tennant got them and said they would be just fine. I also had to provide the address of the place I was moving into in August since the league was also going to be sending something personal to me. As everything moved along, I was regularly given Twitter notifications from The Stanley Cup, which was adding my little Tweet to little token mementos of the Lightning’s Stanley Cup victory. A couple of weeks into August, while I was trying to settle into my new place, I received a surprise package that wasn’t marked from anyone I knew. I had already gotten a couple of other packages there from my sister, who had sent me bedsheet sets to help me get settled, but this one was smaller and lighter. And when I opened it, I was delighted to hold an embossed plaque of the very Tweet that had gotten me into the Hall of Fame. A note from the NHL that accompanied it said that my Tweet would ALSO be in the Hall, in Toronto, for every hockey fan to see!
You can see what this amounts to: I’M A HOCKEY HALL OF FAMER! It’s an exciting honor to have now, and the plaque the league sent me is now alongside my brick from the Memorial Auditorium as my greatest and most meaningful sports memento. The years I spent playing little league hockey have really added up to something! My finally little league coach was a disingenuous shitbag who was probably the phoniest person I’ve ever had the displeasure of not being able to avoid. He was making an active attempt to get me to quit the team. Even my parents saw that, and they fought against it simply by making me show up for every practice and every game. And when the season ended, his job as a public schoolteacher pushed him into the presence of two family friends and my sister. My friends hated his guts back then. I know for a fact that one of them still does. He had my sister as a student when she was close to graduating high school. She doubly hated his guts because he frequently made references to me, and she still has nothing good to say about him. But after having to be on this asshole’s team for a year and showing up as a way of revenging his attempt to push me off the team, I now found a new form of revenge: If he ever visits the Hockey Hall of Fame, he has to pay a damn admission fee to look at MY name. (Or my pseudonym, at least.) Also, the subject he taught was English, and the fact that I Tweeted my way into hockey immortality means I have a better handle on that than he ever will.
Now the only thing left is to start looking for Tampa Bay Lightning jerseys. It seems appropriate since a Tweet about the Tampa Bay Lightning made me a Hockey Hall of Famer.
The Windy Nickel 