Because It's the Cup

I'm tired of talking about weighty subjects.  Primarily, I'm just tired.  It's taking most of my energy just to breathe, for one thing.  Whatever is wrong with me being still wrong with me, now with the addition of a rather alarming rash that has so far spared my face, but that's about it, which I assume is a side effect of one of the medications I'm taking.  But, what can one do?  Persevere, that's what.  But I'd love a break from the kinds of issues that I've been pondering lately and just relax, but there's something looming in the way.  Something that is causing me to lose sleep and become anxious.  Something that makes me want to crawl in a hole and hide for the next eight weeks.  It's the NHL playoffs.

Most hockey fans live for this time of the year.  But not me.  Truth be told, I hate the playoffs.  There's just way too much pressure in this town and on this team.  I have my own reasons why I desperately want the Pens to win - over and above just wanting them to do well and vicariously inflate my ego when they do because I can say I'm so wonderfully smart to have chosen such a winning team.  Those haven't changed since I wrote about them last year.  But, it's more than that.  It's this obscene level of expectation that we have around here and how nasty it can become when the team doesn't live up to the level the fans expect.

I get it to a degree.  We've got the greatest player on ice right now, backed up by the rest of the team that's loaded with talent.  We should dominate.  Or that's the prevailing thought anyway.  But, my point of view is that if it was so easy to win a professional sports championship, then everyone would have multiples of them.  It's not.  It's a lot of things combined:  talent, coaching, the opposing team, how healthy the team is, how tired they are (notably in an Olympic year), and a little bit of luck.  Hockey is a streaky sport.  We all know that.  You get hot in the playoffs and sometimes it's you raising the cup when no one else expected it.  Ask the Kings.  Sometimes your luck runs out and you fizzle when you're expected to go deep.  Ask the President's Trophy Capitals from the 2009/2010 season.  But I know the potential is there for the Penguins every year, and I've been as guilty as anybody in expecting too much.  I turned to my husband at one point during the season two years ago and actually said out loud, "You might as well hand us the Cup right now."  He just looked at me.  I assume his thought at the time was along the lines of, "Oh, if I had a nickel for every time I've thought that about the Cowboys and the playoffs since 1995."  Then the Flyers happened and we were out in six ugly games in the first round.

Then Boston happened last year.  It was heartbreaking, true, but you'd have thought the team lost to a bunch of 80-year old widows, not a highly elite hockey club, who actually are the odds on favorite to win the Cup this year.  I was painfully disappointed, I'm not going to deny it.  Many, however, were just plain mad.  They wanted heads to roll.  They didn't.  So, this year the verbal and written vitriol started early.  The Pens have been up and down since the Olympic break and every rough outing - heck, every rough period - brought out the boo birds.  Fire Blysma.  Trade Fleury.  This is the worst Penguins team ever (and even I know that's so far from the truth as to be patently absurd).  And so on.  I think the only player I didn't see attached to a negative Tweet is Sidney Crosby, and that's probably just because anyone inclined to write one knows the rest of us would hunt them down and force them to take it back.

It's the maternal instinct in me, I'm sure, but I hate all of that negativity with a passion.  It's hurtful on an oddly personal level.  I like my team.  They've given me so much joy that I feel protective of them.  More to the point:  I don't want them to be so psyched out on the pressure of the expectations that their heads do a number on them that the opposing team cannot.  I want them focused.  I want them relaxed.  I want them ready.  And I want us to support them.  But as it is I'm as nervous as a cat in a dog pound.  My nails are all chewed down to nothing.  My muscles are tense.  I am no in way looking forward to this.  And that's not the way it's supposed to be.  It's supposed a time of celebration and excitement.

So, here's what I want all of us to do:  I want us to realize this is our city, this is our team.  Come what may.  If the Penguins lose, on the morning after, we will still get up like we always do.  The sun will rise like it always does.  Our day will go on.  Our families will love us; we will love them. Or not.  As the case may be for some of us.  We will have joys, we will have sorrows.  Our lives will proceed.  As scheduled.  This will not end us.  So, let's relax, all of us, and let's go out there and support our team.

 Because it's the Cup, dammit!