I was not born a Blackhawks fan.
Some little miseries, like Type-2 diabetes and North Side baseball, run generations deep in my bloodlines, buried in my DNA code and anticipated from the cradle. But as I continually refresh ESPN.com while I blunt my nerves with a Miller High Life, I have to accept the full terrible responsibility for this fresh form of agony.
The world-champion Blackhawks are on the cusp of playoff elimination, one Dallas Stars- win away from summer on the golf course. And while the millions who came out for the victory parade have moved on to the suddenly big-time Bulls, I feel like the guy who starts dating his best friend a month before graduation – a whirlwind romance that cuts straight to the heartbreak.
Understand the plight of a kid growing up in the suburbs of Jordan’s Chicago, in a time when all Blackhawks home games were blacked out because of a misguided money-grubbing owner who thought television broadcasts would hurt attendance. My formative years came during the dark days of Chicago hockey – besides, the Cubs and Bears were where the Carson family turned for athletic heartbreak. Hockey skipped a generation in Chicago and jumped me in the process.
But as I got older I realized that most of Chicago never got passed over, and that hockey has always been alive in neighborhoods that have barely changed over the last 50 years. Watching my playoff dreams die in a Firefox browser window at least makes me feel a part of that sometimes-painful past because, more than anything else, being a hockey fan in Chicago is about being left behind.
(Just now the Minnesota Wild score on the Stars. But then I check and see that Minnesota has lost all three games this year to Dallas by a combined 12 goals to three. Oops, and the Stars tie it up. I need another High Life.)
When I came to college I found friends from places like Detroit and Minneapolis. By sophomore year I could tell a Molson from a Labatt and knew when we had to cycle the puck and when it was time to dump-and-chase. Watching at least a couple games a week became habit. And last year, when everyone west of Pennsylvania became a Blackhawks fan, I got my first taste of following a championship team that I really cared about.
(The Stars take a 2-1 lead. They shouldn’t even be allowed to play hockey in Dallas. All warm weather cities should be stripped of their teams and have them relocated in the middle of the night to cities like Winnipeg or Cleveland.)
Because my generation grew up with a hole where hockey belonged, the sport has a special flavor in Chicago. The Blackhawks trotted out some good teams in the early 90s in the days of Roenick and Belfour and Chelios, but the city stayed comparatively hockey-blind because it’s hard to love a team you can’t watch. People who moved to the city or casually followed from the suburbs adopted the Cubs or MJ’s Bulls; the Blackhawks were the stepchild, a less cosmopolitan crowd cheering for an afterthought in a major sports market.
(The Wild tie things up at 2-2, then score again to take the lead. I silently vow to hug the first potentially Minnesotan Scandinavian-looking person that I see on Sheridan Road.)
If the Cubs and Sox split the city into north and south, the Blackhawks feel rooted in the western parts of the city – the bungalows and the neighborhoods where families have been planted for generations, the parts of the city where the high rises end, people mark distance by parish and pretty much every house has at least one flagpole.
In Chicago, the neighborhoods get overlooked in favor of the skyscrapers, and the Blackhawks for the Cubs and Bears. But they’ve stayed there, as strong as they were a half-century ago. The Stars game just ended, the Wild win 5-3. It isn’t worth a parade, but it does mean one more week of hockey. I’ll take it however I can – I have 19 years of catch-up to do.
Mike Carson is a Weinberg senior. He can be reached at [email protected]. Illustration by Shelly Tan.
