It's Almost That Time Again..

It's true. It is. It's almost time for hockey to start back up. I'm slowly getting back into the groove of reading information on prospects and such. While my friends of teams like the Flames and Oilers are really excited for hockey to be back, I am not there. I think I am ready, and then I watch clips from last season or read talk of the playoffs and panic strikes. My anxiety levels go past Keith Ballard sitting in the press box and right through the roof. I'm trying to be excited, I really am but I keep getting flash backs.....

Sitting alone in my living room watching Game 7, refusing to believe it was actually over. Shedding a few tears, trying to pull myself together and saying ' it's just a game'...that turned into ' it's just a god damn game'...which then turned into ' holy fucking hell I'm going to smash my laptop into pieces'. Even now my chest feels all tight when I think back to everything that went through my head that night. (ok, maybe that's partly to do with the fact I'm wearing my Tanner Glass Scrabble Champ shirt and it looks like his face is on my boob). Then came the rioting. I knew it would come no matter what but it was still shocking, sitting up alone until well after midnight watching it all unfold on CTV.

I want to have flashbacks of the happy times. Alex Burrows' and Kevin Bieksa's great goals don't work, because I just remember being so exciting thinking ' holy shit, this may actually happen'.  I wish I could think back to just watching regular season games that weren't life or death, chirping some of my Oilers and Flames fan friends. I just can't seem to remember exactly what that's like. Hopefully once the first regular season game gets here I will feel that excitement again. Dealing with some personal crap in my own life, hopefully it will be a nice distraction.

I am excited for these things

• Seeing Keith Ballard actually play again
• Seeing Chris Tanev continue to be awesome
• Keith Ballard's first hipcheck of the season
• Seeing Mason Raymond skate again
• Hopefully, once I get some stuff sorted out, get back to Vancouver for a home game. It's been way to long.
• Gathering up as many Canucks fans as I can here in Edmonton and watching a game somewhere

That's all I have right now. Anyway, while you're reading  check out this great story on Tanner Glass giving back to his home town. also Alixiswright37's great blog post  "A Day In The Life Of A Canucks Fan". Hopefully I have more to say soon.

Random Observations Surrounding Game 1

That game was great, I expected a Canucks win in game 1 but the first period, at least, was better then I was thinking. Although, Canucks fans need to thank the hockey god's for the posts behind Luongo on more then a few occasions. I was hoping they would interview Ballard during the live post game interviews on Canucks.com, but no luck. Hoping there is something in the papers today, I want to know what he thought about his first playoff game. However, according to Jim Hughson Ballard was barely on the ice as apparently Dan Hamhuis wore both number 2 and number 4 last night. I couldn't believe the amount of people leaving the game early, I know traffic gets bad, the skytrain gets packed but it's a playoff game! I don't care if the team is up 2-0, stay until the end and cheer them on.

I am so glad I finally caved and signed up for twitter last summer. I've met some awesome people and being able to connect with other Canucks fans has been awesome since I live in a house of Flames fans, that don't even really watch hockey. It was great last night, within like 5 seconds of a goal or big hit I'd look at my twitter tab and see like 40 new tweets. It was fun to read through and see I wasn't alone with some of my thoughts. I also won my Ballard jersey thanks to twitter, although it's not here yet. Was really hoping it would be here in time for game 1 but hopefully it gets here today or tomorrow. I really want to go to one of the outdoor rinks before it warms up to much and get some pictures done.

One thing that really melted my butter last night were some of the Oilers fans, they feel the need to bitch and whine and claim #1 about EVERYTHING. (Yes, I know there are many great Oiler's fans out there, as there are many bad Canucks fans) I don't know how often I have to sit here and listen to ' Oh we did this before Calgary', ' we were first at this'. Last night, some felt the need to call Canucks fans singing the national anthem pathetic and crappy. Apparently they started the whole arena singing the anthem thing first. Who the hell cares if you did? Why do you need to call it pathetic and crappy? I'm sorry but I don't care who's fans are singing it, who did it first. Point is you have 19,000+ people singing OUR NATIONAL ANTHEM in unison. I don't give a crap if it's Oilers fans, Flames fans hell even if it was Leafs fans I'd stilll appreciate the fact that there are that big of a group of people singing our countries song. Show some pride for your country in general, Edmonton is not the center of the universe.

On a national anthem note, I love Mark Donnelly probably more then he loves cake. I'm also pretty sure Richard Loney is brought back from the dead each time he comes to sing.

Team Colours

I put a link to my last post on my facebook and my dad commented saying this

Hey Christine, how about talking about how pissed your dad gets when looking at the crowd at Rogers Arena, and seeing a mess of colour in the stands. As a shut in, not being able to go to games, I always watch them on TV. This cities crowd does not know how to cheer for our team. people wearing grey, yellow, black,green,orange, shirts or jackets. Come on people, it's a home game. Wear something BLUE. I'm not saying the ladies don't look good in their pink Canucks shirts, I would just like to see the fans support our great team. come on SHOW OUR COLOURS. If you can't afford a jersey, find a blue shirt or t shirt. Other fans fill there arenas with the home colours . lets show the team and the world that we support our #1 team. Dean.

Sorry dad, You're probably not going to like my answer. You make a good point, but I have a few of my own.  I'm not saying I don't agree that it would be nice to see an Arena filled with blue, as we see in Calgary with all their red.

First off, I  HATE pink hockey stuff. HATE. I have a very hard time coming to terms with womans 'fitted' jerseys, but I have. I refuse to come to terms with the fact that their needs to be pink stuff made for girls to wear it. I do like the regular coloured t-shirts, tank tops, hell I even like the underwear, but something about the idea of changing the colours to be more girly just rubs me the wrong way. Pink and those stupid looking bedazzled type jerseys are stupid, support your team, where their actual jersey, don't change things up to look more 'girly. This may also be a result of the fact I'm just a 'Hockey loving tom boy' and hate the colour pink in general. Those pictures you can find from time to time with girls wearing nothing but a jersey and standing with a hockey stick and such, I find the girls wearing the baggy regular jerseys to be 'sexier' then if they are wearing some tight fitting or pink crap. Not that I'm attracted to girls at all, and not that there's anything wrong with a girl being attracted to a girl, but.........I'm going way off track here.

Second, this team has had so many different colours as their jerseys in the past 40 years. Black, orange, red, yellow, blue, green...am I forgetting anything?a few shades of each. If you had the chance to buy a jersey over the years, but don't now and still want to wear a Canucks jersey to the game, it's going to be the wrong colours.  If you take a look at the merchandise available with Canucks logos on it, you end up with the green, blue, white and pink quite often, but their is also all the stuff with the old logos. Especially right now with the Canucks celebrating their last 40 years, they have come back with the different vintage styles, obviously the flying skate logo isn't going to look right on a blue or green t-shirt. People like that logo, and will spend the money on a 40th anniversary t-shirt to have it, instead of a white whale on a blue t-shirt. Also, the people who still want to support a player but can't afford a jersey are going to go with the player t-shirts, these are a very dark blue compared to the bright blue that is in the uniforms. The Flames have had the same colours for their 30 years of existence in Calgary. This makes it easy for the "sea of red", whether you bought your jersey, jackets or other shirts 10, 15,20 years ago, or yesterday it's still going to look the same in the crowd.

Third, Canucks ticket prices have skyrocketed, I remember going to games and they had specials for 4 tickets, plus white spot and parking for just over $100. Now, Canucks fans laugh at other teams with pricing like that, wishing this was still possible in Vancouver. The teams success has made going to games the cool thing to do, the thing the hip people do. This has lead to people who don't even care much about the game, or supporting the team in other ways, go to the games to be able to say "Hey, I went to the Canucks game last night!".  All the suits that used to win tickets through work and used to give them away like candy, are now going to the games, usually straight after work, still in their suits. Most t-shirt prices and everything are even up, if you want a nice t-shirt your usually looking at about $40, and with the world the way it is right now, a lot of people are just going to choose to wear their older stuff. It still says Vancouver Canucks and still has *a* Canucks logo, so its still cheering for their team.

I guess until we see this team use the same colours for a longer period of time their is always going to be a lot of variation in the crowd. Watching pre game warm ups online, and now finally finding a Sportsnet Pacific feed, I see lots more crowd shots, there is a lot of people in Canucks stuff, a lot older, but still cheering their team wearing it. People would also rather wear an older shirt, with a logo or name then just a plain blue shirt. That combined with the suits, and the "Cool people", are all going to add together to make a giant rainbow of colours. Don't get me wrong, I would love to see Rogers Arena a "Sea Of Blue", but I just don't see it happening any time soon.


Did I just get through an entire post without mentioning Keith Ballard once? Hot damn, I deserve a cookie. I also deserve a cookie because its my birthday.