Lincicome: That apathy you smell is not an Edmonton thing, it’s a hockey thing
According to reliable witnesses, ice hockey — not unlike the Dude — abides; that is, the annual pursuit of Lord Stanley’s Cup is down to a rematch of the Sunny South and the Frosty North, and nails are being bitten through nervous mittens.
The news has not spread much beyond the town limits of Sunrise, Florida, and, uh, — wait, it will come to me — uh, Edmonton, yes. Canada’s team, which is like considering Tulsa to be America’s laundromat.
In these times with tariffs and threats and political spit taking, hockey’s big finish takes on added weight, as if the Stanley Cup is not heavy enough already.
A few months ago when Canada beat the U.S. in some international hockey tournament or other, former Canadian PM Justin Trudeau puffed, “You can’t take our country and you can’t take our game.”
He was only half right, of course. The game has been taken, not too long ago by Chicago as a matter of fading fact. Lately the Cup abides in places such as Las Vegas and Tampa Bay and Los Angeles, city and suburbs.
A Canadian team has not won a Stanley Cup this century and they don’t need me or Donald Trump to remind them. This is the sort of stuff that annoys our northern neighbors in much the same way that our need to judge a quarterback does around here.
(And just an aside here to thank Caleb Williams for liking us, really, really liking us.)
Up there eyes are riveted and hearts are enchanted by the goings on of the Oilers, a team sent down here to face the defending champion, a team on the edge of the Everglades in its third straight final.
Edmonton should be the stuff of fairy tale and of legend when instead it is an anxious proxy, moaning about lack of respect, kind of like our own Oklahoma City where the NBA has taken shallow root.
Instead of being proudly defiant, Edmonton is annoyingly touchy, sort of a self-limiting snapshot of the sport itself, about which I shall say more later.
On this side of the 49th parallel we have not been enthralled by “their game,” generally treating the Stanley Cup as if it were dinner theater, and not the good stuff like Little Shop of Horrors, either.
Just as an example, women’s basketball has outdrawn hockey games on television, and even horse racing has overwhelmed the game of sticks and pucks. And look out for pickle ball. It has plans.
NASCAR is riding higher than hockey, and occasionally higher than other games, including the NBA and baseball, so that a case could be made for stock car racing as the fourth major sport, and even the third on days when Caitlin Clark is on IR.
Hockey is the incredible shrinking sport, about to disappear altogether, the TV ratings for its grandest event as fitful as a presidential hairdo.
It may have something to do with the fact that the two outposts disputing this Cup are at either end of hockey’s polar system, so far from the fringe that extra postage is required just to reach the fringe.
Florida is to hockey what toilet tissue is to a high heel. People will snicker before they point it out. Ice has only one use in Florida, to keep the lemonade cold.
On the other glove, Edmonton is four-square hockey territory, where the spring thaw is viewed as a betrayal. This is a local alarm, much as is the hockey team, and does not travel well.
And should Edmonton win the Cup, the trophy might disappear somewhere up there and out there, never to be seen again. This has less to do with Edmonton, a decent sort of burg, than it does with hockey’s wish to vanish altogether.
This — and I am getting back to the point I promised earlier — is so typically hockey. It is not that anyone is against Edmonton. Not here. Not anywhere. It is that no one cares enough to be against Edmonton. Nor against Florida. Nor against any hockey team.
The caring world beyond the rink can be found in those teeny, tiny TV ratings. Wake up and smell the apathy.
This is the way the NHL ends, not with a bang but a simper.