Blogger 365 Day 133 - It comes to this

I am just sitting here, waiting for the hockey game tonight.  Game's like the one tonight are the joy and bane of sports fans.  While there are plenty of sports in which a playoff format is simply one and done, there is much more complexity and nuance in a Game 7 of a best of seven series.  For the winner there is a sense of relief, an almost Houdini-esque escape which allows the season to continue, for the loser the first impulse is to almost overreact, that if only certain changes were made the team would not find itself in this position again.

Here in Pittsburgh winning is treated almost as a birthright (save for baseball) and losing is abject failure.  There is no perspective when it comes to our sports, places in the NHL like Edmonton or Toronto, or Florida would love to have a team that consistently makes the post season and while not always winning championships (only one team gets to win that after all) almost always find themselves in the mix with at least the possibility of reaching for and grasping the brass ring.  There is little appreciation for what we have here, only a sense of entitlement.  A loss tonight will not be greeted with a "well, we had a nice season" but outrage and a myriad listing of who should be fired or traded.  A win and the process will repeat itself in the next round of the playoffs.  

As for me, a win and I will be positing at least five more highlight videos on this blog, a loss and there will only be one.  At least until next season when everything will wash, rinse, repeat.