No Stanley Cup final has had us this bourqued in quite some time.A little background on bourqued: Co-blogger Neil Acharya and Ben Milledge developed it (who said it first is lost to memory) when they hosted a sports panel show, The Sports Revolution, on a campus radio station. It is meant to capture the state of being unable to feign an interest in what's supposed to be a major sports story. Neil and Ben coined it in 2001, when the media made the Stanley Cup final all about Ray Bourque's quest to win a ring in Colorado, nothwithstanding that he was a Boston icon playing two thousand miles from where the magic happened.
Symptoms include metaphorical nausea, such as, "If I hear one more story about the Ottawa Senators being Canada's Team, I'm gonna puke." Usually, the root cause of being bourqued stems from ingesting too much media hype. (Oddly enough, the phrase was coined right around the time Pierre McGuire of TSN and NBC became a household name.) Sometimes bourqued status is self-inflicted by a league. The NHL has done so by, among other sins, taking almost a week off between the conference finals and its championship. (Who do they think they are, the NFL?)
Bottom line, the sun is out, people are in shifting into summer mode and it just seems surreal that the NHL season isn't over. Even for this resident of Ottawa, where it's impossible to walk 10 feet without seeing some reminder that the Senators are in the final, it's all too easy for to feel bourqued .
True, the reason Game 1 won't go until tonight is due to Anaheim's arena being booked on the weekend for, wait for it, an ice show. (Can you imagine the NBA Finals being delayed because the San Antonio Spurs' home floor is in use by an adult volleyball league on Mondays and Wednesdays from 7-9 p.m.?)
There's more to it than just arena availability. The NBA Finals go late into June too, but basketball players wear shorts and sleeveless uniform tops, which is more in keeping with the time of year than hockey gear. They also don't have to play on ice which is turned into porridge by 85 F temperatures.
Are the Senators with Daniel Alfredsson (second photo) on a career-defining roll, going to be the first Canadian-based team to win since 1993? Are future Hall of Famers Chris Pronger (top photo) and Teemu Selanne going to win their first Cup rings?
Better question: Wouldn't it have been great if the league could have sorted this all out a month ago, when winter wasn't a distant memory and most of the arenas across Canada hadn't removed their ice for the summer?
It's bad enough there was this long layoff between rounds, but if the NHL screwheads didn't take from September to the middle of April -- more than seven months! -- to decide which teams are worthy of a post-season spot, we could have started the playoffs in March and been wrapped up some time around Mother's Day. That would have significantly cut into the bourqued factor.
Instead, the season drags on forever and not just in the NHL. Junior hockey's Memorial Cup (which was decided yesterday) will probably be awarded in June before long. The longer the season goes, it's easier and easier for even dyed-in-the-wool hockey nuts to get bourqued. The fact the CBC's largest post-season audience this spring came in Game 7 of the Dallas-Vancouver first-round series seems to say more about the reality that it's hard to hang in once the weather warms up, luring people outdoors and out of hockey mode, than it says about the Senators' growing national appeal.
For pity's sake, it's May 28. It's later than any Stanley Cup final ever ended prior to 1987 and the first game hasn't even started. This is nothing new for the NHL, what with its endless capacity for farce, but it cheats the game to drag out the season this long.
Sure, the hard core, especially the people in Ottawa driving around with their cars painted up in red and black, don't mind, but excuse those among us who would are totally bourqued. Some effort to watch the Senators-Ducks championship series (and post on it) will be made, but out of obligation, not so much interest.
It needs to be said: In a just world, the only Canadians to keep tabs on in pro sports right now would be assorted baseball players and Steve Nash leading his Phoenix Suns in the NBA playoffs. Of course, we all know what NBA commisioner David Stern did to the Suns that's also left us totally bourqued about the basketball playoffs.
That's all for now. Send your thoughts to neatesager@yahoo.ca.
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1 comment:
I'm with you -- if I didn't live in Ottawa, there's no way I'd be tuning in religiously, and I'm a hockey hound. The season has been going since September, fer cryin' out loud - what you are seeing here is simply fan fatigue, similar to what baseball is now starting to see at World Series time since they went with the wildcard format.
You'll note that while the Ducks claimed lack of arena availability for Saturday, the Senators were forced to move the Roger Waters concert to accomodate Game 4. The difference being, of course, that the Ducks don't own their own arena, while the Senators do.
It also pays to have a loud, belligerent GM in that Brian Burke would have screamed all summer had the league made the Ducks start the Final last Thursday on two day's rest. Gary Bettman doesn't have the near-dictatorial powers that Paul Tagliabue did, though, so he has to kowtow to important power figures in the League like Lou Lamoriello and Brian Burke. In order to avoid the wrath of Brian, therefore, the League now looks foolish, and is going to have one of the lowest TV ratings for a Cup Final ever. Even if the hockey is great, no one is going to see it, which will be blamed on Ottawa's market size instead of on the real reason. Well played.
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