DISCLAIMER: There will be talk of being a fan of multiple different teams in this post, and not even just the team of the location you were born. I know this can be extremely triggering for many sports fans, and to be clear, I hear you. But that’s not what this is about, so sit back and enjoy the ride.

I want to be upfront about what this is. This isn’t a “The Canadians were right all along, hockey is secretly great, let me convert you” article, and it’s not a highlight reel of a good playoff run. It’s the story of a guy who grew up a complete outsider to the sport, and ended up twenty years later catching a full-blown case of hockey fever. There’s a lot of ground to cover, some of it’s embarrassing, some of it involves my short attention span and sports media rights, and it ends somewhere I did not see coming.

Unlike the other major American sports leagues, hockey is the only one I didn’t play at any point in my life. Naturally I played baseball, basketball and football for several years, and though it was only for two brief seasons, I did play soccer as a kid. And while I prefer the term football for what happens at the highest level of club competition in Europe and the World Cup, I most certainly did not play that kind of football, I played soccer. One season with a schoolmate whose parents owned a Mexican restaurant and sponsored the team, he and his brother on the team were so talented they were even getting me the ball in front of the net and I was scoring. It was incredible. The next year I played for a Mormon coach who stuck me on the back line and I’m not sure we even won a game. That was the end of my soccer career.

But hockey? I never played a second of it, never saw an ice rink. Nobody from my hometown circle did either, hockey just wasn’t a big thing in the agricultural heartland of Central California. I was even under the impression I was too big for hockey. Then I saw the Sharks’ 7th round draft pick this year, Alexander Karmanov, a 7-foot-1 defenseman out of Chisinau, Moldova — the tallest player ever drafted in NHL history. Brock Lesnar has two sons, and they both play hockey, I’m sure they would dwarf me on the ice as well. But this article tells the story of how it all finally fell into place.

My first exposure to hockey came in high school, a buddy of mine and his family were diehard Sharks fans. These were the Sharks teams of my formative fandom years, hell on ice, at least in the regular season. I even had nicknames for a lot of the guys — Jonathan Cheechoo “Train,” Joe “every rose has its” Thornton, Pattie “melt” Marleau, Brent Burns with his toothless grin was “Gummy Bear,” Fred Vlasic was The Pickler, and Danny Boyle was “Boil on Your Ass” — every hit he threw or slapshot he ripped got a “you got a Boyle on your ass!” out of me directed toward the opposing team. The pace of play was exciting, but I was missing the action half the time and stuck enjoying the replays. I wasn’t fully getting it. Then there were the painful playoff eliminations — from 2004 to 2010, a great season ended in a humiliating playoff exit, year after year after year.

Amazingly, those years of Sharks playoff disappointment were interrupted when I moved outside Raleigh in 2005 and attended my first live NHL game. It kicked things up to a level I hadn’t fathomed. Entering the arena and feeling that 50 degree air being pumped down onto you, wading through the turnstiles with thousands of people adorned in hockey jerseys, walking through the tunnel of your section down into the lower bowl and seeing it all laid out before you, the sheet of ice, the plexiglass, the big scoreboard video screen hanging from the ceiling. That all hits you in a way that a television broadcast simply can’t translate effectively. Which would become one of my biggest gripes about hockey for years. Suffice to say, that all of that in-person experience occurred before the puck even dropped, then the sights and sounds of the game became all consuming. The skates filleting the ice, the crisp sound of the puck being passed around and the satisfying click when the blade catches it, the crash of the boards, and the gasp when a slapshot zings off the crossbar and a metallic ping radiates throughout the arena. It’s three periods of pure adrenaline, a great live event, it was a fun place to down a few beers and get caught up in the fervor. And those Carolina Hurricanes I saw for my first live hockey game? They turn out to be very important for how this whole thing comes together.

The 2005-2006 Hurricanes came to me right after the missed season of 04-05 that saw a prolonged labor dispute cost the league a full season, and usher in a salary cap that had unintended consequences on the attempt for parity in the league.

These Canes had serious talent. A 21 year old Eric Staal, Captain Rod Brind’Amour, Cam Ward at goalie (not the Titans QB). They were a fun team to watch, I loved seeing hockey in person and I was fast becoming a believer in it being the best live sports experience, but I didn’t feel it translated to television in a way that would sustain me as a viewer. The Canes went on to win the Stanley Cup that year, beating the Oilers in seven games.

The 2010’s started off hot with the Winter Olympics. I watched the Gold Medal game in a bar with friends in California and seeing Sid the Kid and Canada defeat the US was rough. Throughout the first half of the decade I saw a handful of games when the Sharks would play in Denver against the Av’s, including a shootout win for San Jose where I sat five rows up from the goal behind the glass, probably the best live hockey experience I’ve had.

In 2016 I was back visiting my old friends in California who had been the Sharks fans that first showed me the sport in my high school days. The Sharks were in the Stanley Cup finals, finally, after years of regular season success and postseason heartbreak, they were at the doorstep of immortality, their names just a few games away from being forever engraved upon Lord Stanley’s cup, and they lost. Pittsburgh Penguins defeated the Sharks 4 games to 2. Sidney Crosby had ripped another championship away from a team I was backing, on his way to winning the Conn Smythe trophy as the MVP of the playoffs.

Okay, I get it, shit happens. You don’t always win. But this was more than that, I wasn’t even closely following the sport at this point. I had just been back in an environment where the playoffs were a focal point of the people I was visiting, but I didn’t have cable, I didn’t have the NHL out-of-market package, I followed the NFL and College Football vehemently but in order to watch them I’d have to go to a buddy’s house or a sports bar, neither of which I was opposed to at the time, in fact I greatly favored the latter. The issue was, there was this sport that I didn’t fully comprehend, that was incredibly exciting to see in person, that was difficult to find and watch on television, and even when I did so, it wasn’t really that enjoyable for me.

So in 2017 I took a trip to Boston, I saw two Bruins games at the TD Garden. The first against the San Jose Sharks, and the second against the Los Angeles Kings, that Sunday we went to see the Patriots and the Chargers play, Tom Brady got the win, it was famously Jimmy Garoppolo’s last game as a Patriot before being traded to San Francisco. It was the second annual “Ultimate Sports Weekend,” a trip me and my friends coined to describe having a weekend rendezvous somewhere in America based on sports events. The first annual Ultimate Sports Weekend featured a trip to LA for UFC 199, the best live sports event I’ve attended, followed by a trip up the coast for a Red Sox-Giants game that was the David Ortiz farewell tour and a walk-off win for the Red Sox thanks to Xander Bogaerts. That’s another story for another time.

What this Bruins bang-bang (a term I use, coined by Louis CK, to describe doing the same thing twice in a row — in his case its original meaning refers to eating a meal out at a restaurant and immediately following it up by eating another meal at a different restaurant) did was convince me I needed to become a true hockey fan, and I was going to smash my head against the wall doing so until it happened. I went back to Colorado where I was living and signed up for the NHL.TV package. I was going to come home and watch the Bruins every night they were on, usually at 5 o’clock Mountain Time, and it was going to be the greatest thing ever. I quickly learned that NHL.TV is not the hockey equivalent of MLB.TV. MLB.TV had its issues, of course you couldn’t watch Sunday Night Baseball that ESPN had the rights to, but you could see the vast majority of your team’s games, provided you lived in another market. And with the only in-market team blacked out being the Rockies for me at that time, it was an incredible amount of content for a very reasonable price, plus I used a school email to get a 35% student discount for about a decade. My first season with NHL.TV was my last. The Bruins were a great squad — Patrice Bergeron, Brad Marchand, Tuukka Rask between the pipes, Zdeno Chara’s hulking 6’9″ frame on the blue line, and up-and-comers David Pastrnak and Charlie McAvoy rounded out a Cup contender squad.

Everything was set up for me to enjoy the ride of Bruins hockey, from an incredible arena I had just spent two evenings in to their world class roster. Then the issues began, because the Bruins were a top team, an inordinate amount of their games were on cable, meaning not available to me on NHL.TV. Also NHL Network would show a few games a week of different teams, and I thought sure, of course, MLB Network does this as well. But what MLB doesn’t do is black out the MLB Network games for their MLB.TV subscribers. The NHL did this. Every NHL Network game the Bruins played was unavailable to me. Every cable game was off the table as well. If they had games on NBC, I wasn’t getting those either, no rabbit ears would work for me on the side of a mountain where I lived. The games they played against top competition were nearly all blacked out, because they were the most coveted by networks. I swore off NHL.TV and would never buy it again. I would however still follow the Bruins — watching their highlights the next day on YouTube, checking them out in bars or restaurants when it fell into place — but the accessibility issue was wide enough that the passion for following the team was gone. And more than I liked hockey, I liked that team.

The summer of 2019 rolls around and I have a modest futures bet on the Bruins I placed at MGM Grand in person in Las Vegas. The Bruins end up in the Stanley Cup finals, my parents are planning a trip to Vegas the week after the finals. I have this plan in my head of handing them the futures ticket and them cashing it in. “Wow, our son the genius predicted the future and he made some money at it.” Well, I didn’t really expect them to do that. The Bruins went down 3 games to 2 in the series after losing a tight game 5 by a score of 2-1. They had clawed their way back and forced a game 7 in Boston, this was it, the cards had fallen into place perfectly, and then the Bruins lost game 7.

With that bitter taste in my mouth, the next year was the Covid season, the playoffs happen in a bubble, the following year after that the NHL fully bends over for Canadian politics and enforces the strongest vaccine mandate of any sports league in North America, 100% gotta have it. I check out of hockey entirely, and in doing so miss what is now one of my favorite players, Nikita Kucherov, win consecutive Stanley Cups in 2020 and 2021. 2022 I see the Av’s win it and tip my cap, having been to several Av’s home games in person, but never as an Av’s fan, I was still pleased for them. 2023 is where I begin to increase my disinterest into peak levels — the Boston Bruins are back with a vengeance, they put up 135 points in the regular season, a then NHL record, and run away with the Presidents’ Trophy, the best record in the regular season. They take a commanding 3-1 series lead in the opening round against the Florida Panthers. The Panthers came back and won in 7 games, knocking the Bruins out — the best regular season in league history was meaningless. This was worse than any fumble the Sharks ever had. And to be clear, I wasn’t watching these games. I had no way to at the time, I was a fan who wasn’t willing to pay a hundred bucks a month for cable outside the NFL/College Football season, that also included the MLB postseason. My thoughts on hockey became, “This is stupid, the best teams don’t even win, it’s all about luck, this sport doesn’t even make sense, you can’t even see the puck go into the net half the time when someone does score.”

I not only didn’t watch another hockey game for three years after this, I didn’t even follow the sport, save for one Buffalo Sabres game I attended in person after relocating to their area, which was great live, but I wasn’t going to pay thirty bucks a month for MSG+ to watch the Sabres play — it just wasn’t going to happen.

2026, Team USA wins the Gold Medal at the Winter Olympics. I miss watching it live, but see the replay — 16 years after the heartbreak against Canada, we finally got it done. I was extremely proud, and as a lapsed hockey fan it piques a little interest. I hear a few names on the team and log them into memory, but I don’t try to watch any hockey. Then the Buffalo Sabres make the playoffs, first time in 14 years, and it’s the talk of Western New York. Tage Thompson, Team USA gold medalist, Arizona native — meaning much like me in Central California, he grew up in 110-degree-plus temperatures for much of the year — currently lives in Western New York. The parallels to me were significant.

The Sabres knock out the Bruins in the first round. Pastrnak is still in Boston, but the team is a shell of its 2023 self. The Sabres make it to game 7 of the second round against Montreal — the Montreal Canadiens, the greatest heel team in sports to me outside the New York Yankees. 24 Stanley Cups, from Quebec, the French spelling of the name, the 21,000-seat arena with the fans singing “olé” chants — I can’t stand them, but I absolutely respect them. And I think they’re great for hockey, rivalries matter, and they’re an excellent one for Buffalo and Boston to have.

Through this point of the playoffs, I’m still just reading newspaper clippings and catching social media highlights, but we are arriving at the perfect storm that drew me back into hockey — this time in a way that didn’t just make me a casual fan again, it “unlocked” the sport for me.

This may sound like a paid advertisement, it’s not — if a certain Alphabet Corporation wanted it to be, they can send me a number, as long as it’s not zero I’ll probably say yes. YouTube TV launches their long-awaited skinny sports bundle. Introductory price of 55 bucks a month, jumping to 65 a month after one year, to include ESPN Unlimited content integration (that means out of market NHL games) by the fall. It has essentially everything you need to be an American sports fan for the big four leagues and college football. (Yes, I hear you, Amazon Prime, Peacock, Netflix, Paramount Plus, and their exclusive games and rights fragmentation. I get it, I get it, I really do. But as of right now it’s a great value for a hockey fan.) All the TV networks, the ESPN suite, Fox and NBC Sports channels. In the back of my mind I decide I’ll subscribe when the World Cup rolls around, and just carry it through football season and probably from then on.

For the first time in decades, it felt like sports fans were made a somewhat reasonable offer — presenting them an enormous slate of live sports content in a central app for a single acceptable price.

On X, I start seeing posts about the Carolina Hurricanes from a rambunctious contingent of fans who are referring to themselves and their club as the “Canefederacy.” They’re posting Civil War memes, replacing the stars and bars with the hurricane warning flag, or at times including the stars and bars and incorporating the hurricane warning flag. This hurricane warning flag logo is an alternate logo that they did not have back when I was seeing them in Raleigh twenty years before — a hockey stick standing up on its end, with two red flags waving from it with black squares in the middle, instantly appears to me to be one of the best logos in sports.

And who would these Hurricanes happen to be meeting in the Eastern Conference Finals — the big bad Canadiens. I watch the game one highlights on YouTube the next day, Canes lose, but they can definitely beat these guys. I watch game two highlights, Nikolaj Ehlers hits a spinning goal in OT and scores the game winner. Series tied 1-1, I gotta be a part of this, I signed up for the YouTube TV offer, and I watched game three, my first time watching a hockey game on television in over three years. Canadiens legend Claude Lemieux comes out with the torch before the game (his last ever public appearance), the Bell Centre is going crazy, it’s quite a sight to see. That’s when I see what the Canes are all about, that’s when I understand the internet memes I’ve been seeing on my timeline — the Canes play a chaotically aggressive style of hockey that I can’t ever remember seeing played at this level before. The speed and intensity of how they constantly harassed Montreal hooked me, I couldn’t watch this style of hockey passively like I used to do. I needed to lock in, everything happening on the ice mattered. This was where I learned the frequency of being a hockey spectator.

Each sport has its own cadence, its own wavelength — you must attune your mind to each to fully engage with it and get the most out of the experience. Over time I have wired my brain differently for different sports. American football is great for our modern attention spans — I can watch a play, then daydream, check my phone, look at the dog, run to the fridge, whatever the hell it is, and have about 30 seconds before the next play, and the announcers and the crowd let you know as you get near to the next snap. Easy to watch. People talk about the fact that there’s only 15 minutes of actual action in football, and I hate this phrase, and I solemnly swear not to use it again, but it’s a feature not a bug. Baseball has its own cadence, and many can’t dial themselves into it — baseball allows you time to fill in the blanks with your own thoughts, be it like a manager working through the changing scenarios and bullpen options and defensive shifts and matchups, or watching the crowd, listening to the announcers, or just letting yourself drift momentarily until the next pitch or contact is offered up. Soccer/world football was one that required patience and time for me, and it’s the most controversial one I can speak of in the United States. But with that equanimity and some level of personal interest, it can be appreciated for what it is, and it rewards that patience with some of the highest skills and achievements of athleticism and mastery of any sport today. Hockey was the most elusive — I couldn’t apply any of the ways I watched other sports to hockey, you can’t watch it passively, you can’t pause or check your phone or look away every sixty seconds. The 2026 Canes taught me this: lock in. Give the sport 45 minutes of attention, that’s about how long each period will last in real time. You’ll get an 18-minute break after to do what you need to do, you’ll get 3 commercial breaks a period as well, roughly at the 14, 10, and 6-minute-remaining marks. You can come up for air then, but by staying focused, watching the pressure and shape, letting the game play out, following the flow of the action — the line changes, the dump and chase, the zone resets — you see the game not as an attempt to find the tiny puck on the ice, you see the 10 men on the ice almost as a living organism, watching its mutations, ebbs and flows, then at the drop of a hat a couple quick passes are made in the offensive zone that open up a sliver of daylight, a shot rings out and hits the back of the net, the goal horn blares and you feel either a sigh of relief and glory, or disappointment. This newfound cadence of watching hockey, of finally cracking the frequency, along with having a team I truly enjoyed watching play, gave me the sport in a way that many others had understood that I had just never fully appreciated.

And these 2026 Canes tied me back to those games twenty years ago at the RBC Center. Eric Staal, the riveting young offensive player that led them to the cup in 2006 whose younger brother Jordan Staal, now 37, captains the current team. He plays a different style than Eric, but is an incredible watch. He scored one of the greatest goals I have ever seen, live or in a highlight package — falling down facing away from the goal, the puck bouncing near his left side, he desperately swung his stick with his left hand and caught just enough of it to lift it up and over a leaping goalie and into the net. A one-in-a-million shot that is only possible when every part of your being is determined to do all you can to succeed.

Rod Brind’Amour, the captain of the ’06 Canes squad, is now the head coach — in his 8th year coaching Carolina he has suffered several heartbreaking playoff defeats. But this team was not carrying any hangover from their previous outings, they added a critical offensive piece in winger Nikolaj Ehlers from Winnipeg in the offseason that unlocked a newfound offensive success that the pace-of-play kings had been missing. Rod the Bod, as he is affectionately and accurately called, became one of my favorite coaches in sports after seeing the way he treats his team and gets them to play a level of ego-less hockey that I don’t know that I have seen played night in and night out across any sport.

The Canes knocked off the Canadiens in 5 games, then rolled into the Finals against a star-studded Vegas Golden Knights team. The Canes went down 2 games to 1 in the series, but clawed all the way back, rattling off three straight victories and bringing the cup home to Raleigh exactly 20 years after that magical 2006 season.

And wouldn’t you know that ESPN Unlimited inside the YouTube TV sports bundle means I’ll be able to watch these Canes all season long next year. And that’s not it — those Sharks, who could never reach the promised land, recently landed the best young player in the league in Macklin Celebrini, and have literally won the lottery multiple times over, the draft lottery, including several top-4 picks including at 1st overall (Celebrini) and 2nd overall (twice), including the 2nd overall pick this year. And I watched the first round of the NHL draft. Yes, really. For the first time in my life. And I was thrilled when the San Jose Sharks drafted Swedish winger Ivar Stenberg, and look forward to watching them hunt through the Pacific together this upcoming season.

It’s all also telling how when people have reasonable access to see your games, they become fans. What a concept, how 20th century of them.

I don’t just watch now because I want to see hockey. I want to see discipline, dedication, sacrifice, selflessness, and relentless fury all in concert to a common goal. When delivered at the highest level, as the Hurricanes just put on display, that’s what makes sports so special. That’s why people watch. That’s why people care.