Morris

Hall looks disengaged, NS • Canada • 28 Years Old • Male

The Road Ahead

I was never a great hockey player. I'm a fairly poor skater and was among the timbits you watch to see how many times they fall during first intermission shinny at a Junior game.

First, I was smaller than all the other kids and couldn't be the stay at home defenseman I wanted to because they were worried about my size. Then, I was lankier than all the other kids and the growth of my limbs had completely outstripped the development of my hand-eye coordination. To boot, most non-competitive NS leagues are non-contact, so I couldn't throw my weight around. I was out of hockey by the time I was 13.

Maybe not coincidentally, what appealed to me when I watched hockey - all sports really - was people succeeding against a stacked deck through sheer force of will.

I guess that's sort of what appealed to people when Tom Brady came around for the Patriots. Now, Nova Scotia if you didn't know is prime Patriots country. I had been a football fan long before I started playing at age 9. I fell asleep watching my first Superbowl and missed some important play where kicker for the team I would go on to cheer for hooked a 47-yard yarder in a direction you may have heard described before. I don't want to talk about it. In any case, when at age 14 all the new Pats fans strolled into school acting like Tom Brady had won the only Superbowl ever played, it was easy as pie to slap the bandwagoner label on them. But I was having a conversation with a Pats fan friend of mine recently, and he said something I'd never heard before: "It's not a bandwagon if you never jump off". I've been giving that a lot of thought.

What the heck does this have to do with the Oilers, you may ask? Well, when I think about it I'm not that different from those Pats fans. My fandom of the Oilers came essentially through osmosis. I loved watching this team win, and in fact as a 5 year old I liked them moreso because they had won - by 1991 they were beginning the hard decline. So I'm a bandwagoner in a sense too. But the truth is, my friend is right: you're not a bandwagoner if you never jump off. So why haven't I jumped off? I haven't jumped off because the team I accidentally started liking remolded themselves into a team that was emblematic of what I valued. They worked hard. And if that didn't work, they worked harder. They seemed to understand the 'force' of will as a physical, tractable property. They loved 'moments'. It's an era that as the years go by I find easier to romanticize. Though there were frustrations of the team being gutted by economic forces beyond their control, and the objective successes came mostly in the form of backhanded compliments about 'exceeded expectations', this is a team that made it easy to continue being an Oilers fan. And given the disparity of talent between the 80s oilers and the ones that came out of the dust-storm of exodus, that's not to be discounted.

We're at a point now where I feel like we've focused so hard on re-creating the team we started cheering for, we've lost sight of the team we kept cheering for. The fact of the matter is that the Boys on the Bus learned to work hard too, and not every success was a show of pure skill. Just like it's easy in today's climate to romanticize the Lunch Pail gang of the 90s and 2000s, it's easy to discount the effort the Boys on the Bus gave. Such is the fog of memory. But I do know that the Oilers have lost track of what to do when the deck is stacked against them. To work hard. And when that doesn't work, to work harder.

You might have read me say around the Oilers boards that I'm going to seriously step back from my investment in this team if they tank again and draft McDavid. Maybe that's all bluster. It's an ugly stain on a neglected pot that's long boiled over. And maybe it doesn't square with my spiteful desire to hold each and every one of those guys who became Pats fans 14 years ago to their words, and grill them on their deathbed about whether they've stuck to their fandom. All I can say is that long after the Boys on the Bus pulled out of town, there were Guys left holding the Wagon, inspiring us to keep on the road ahead.