Life truly begins on opening weekend in September. It's a feeling like your happiness has been hibernating since late January (early February). You get a little taste during the draft and you get to work out your dormant fandom to get it ready during training camp and preseason. But it all truly begins that opening weekend. Saturdays and Sundays (and Mondays and Thursdays) now seem "right" somehow. My daughter will tell you she finds the sound of football on television soothing. I know exactly what she means - it's the soundtrack I grew up with on the weekends. If you're really a big fan, you've got now five days a week where you get to see actual action: high school, college and then the pros. But you live it and breathe it every other moment of the week. It's water cooler fodder ("did you see that play last night...?" "Can you believe that Ray Rice only got a two game suspension?"), it's a primary driving force for your wardrobe choice, your social life revolves around it, and it's even a deciding factor in your decorating choices.
But it's also a force to be reckoned with in terms of time management. So, when the Super Bowl is over and the confetti has flown, there is a secret relief for a brief time because all the honey-dos that have been neglected can be attended to, all the movies you didn't see during the season can be ordered On Demand, and you can actually read a book or two. That feeling lasts for a few weeks, until you find you miss football and begin waiting for the next season to begin. Summer activities are just how you spend your time waiting for at least training camp to begin. But at last the cycle begins anew.
The last second clicks down on the last Stanley Cup final game of the season and most of us experience a bittersweet sensation if it's not our team about to hoist the trophy - we're ready for the season to be over so we can start licking our wounds and looking toward next year, but "next year" seems like a long way off. So we busy ourselves with over-thinking what went wrong this year (unless, of course, we're that small percentage of the fan base who are the ones celebrating and having parades) and tending to yard work and summer chores, all the while absently wondering, "Is it October yet?"
When it finally is October and puck drops on a new season, it's both a relief and a burden. Eighty-two games is a definite time commitment and hockey, if it's your team playing, demands your total attention because anything can happen in the blink of an eye. I, for one, generally greet those little breaks dotted throughout the season as the time I scramble to get some household tasks done or spend time working late so that I'm ready for more hockey. Time away from the game, therefore, is a necessary evil. Just like time away from football. But it is necessary.
In short, there is a pattern to life as either a football fan or a hockey fan that is sustainable. I, for one, spend from May to the end of August pushing to get most of my holiday shopping done. What I can't finish off during the summer I reserve for college football Saturdays because the Steelers are my passion and Sunday is all about chores in the morning and solid football all afternoon into the late night. I mentally line up the books I'm going to read in the off-season. I partake with great abandon of the summer movie season, not really worrying that the latest blockbuster actually sort of sucks as long as stuff blows up. I take the time to sit outside and gaze out at the fireflies as the day winds down. I lovingly detail my car most weekends. And then, after I do all of that, as summer winds down and the leaves begin to lazily fall from the trees, I thank the sports gods because all that spare time goes away in favor of the Steelers and the Pens. Some of you who are reading this likely are nodding at this point, totally getting what I am saying.
This is the life I have lead. This is the life I was prepared to live for the rest of my days. And then I moved to Pittsburgh, and since I was here I dipped my toes into the waters that are professional baseball...
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