First of all, this is a way better sepak takraw link than the one I used yesterday. (I'm pretty sure this is how I sound to non-hockey fans when I talk about hockey...)
The conclusion of my last post found me--a refugee from the Land of 10,000 Frozen Lakes and still mourning the Anakin-to-Vader-like transformation of my Minnesota North Stars into the Dallas Evil Empire--adrift on the left coast amongst a sea of hoops fans, the only land in sight a two-year-old NHL team that might not've given the Baltimore Skipjacks much of a scare.
I starting watching the Sharks, just because...well, they were on. And man, did they stink. They lost a bunch of games off the bat and didn't win at all until nearly the end of October. Still, I watched them anyway, on my tiny little black-and-white TV...or, if I was puttering around my dorm room doing homework or whatever, I would listen to Dan Rusanowsky, then as now the voice of the Sharks, then as now one of the best in the business. Maybe they had some sort of lovable loser appeal to them. Maybe it's just a measure of how much I like hockey that I found following the team worthwhile, despite their (apparent) futility.
Then, so subtly that one almost didn't notice it, the Sharks began to dig their way out of that initial hole. They didn't burn up the league or anything, but they began to win a few games, sometimes a few at a time, and they avoided any lengthy losing streaks. A scrappy Latvian named Arturs Irbe gave them good goaltending--the one ingredient absolutely essential to turning a marginal team into a contender--and former Soviet stars Sergei Makarov and Igor Larionov started to click on offense.
It was around this time that I convinced several of my friends to accompany me down to San Jose to actually take in a live NHL game. I remember that it was a 3-3 tie with Winnipeg. To this day, this remains the only Sharks home game I have ever attended. Was this the night I actually turned the corner and became a full-fledged Sharks fan? I dunno...maybe. I remember rooting for the home team, and I remember being impressed by the gleaming new building and the enthusiasm of the Northern California crowd. Possibly a combination of all these things won me over. Or possibly it was just one more element in a long, gradual process.
What I do know, for sure, is that I was firmly in Team Teal's camp by the time of the one regular-season game that season that I remember even more than the one I attended--a 7-1 shellacking of the wicked Dallas Stars, in the enemy's building. For whatever reason that was a game I listened to on the radio--I don't know if it wasn't on TV, or if I had homework to do, or what. If the latter, I didn't get much work done, because I can remember pacing furiously back and forth in my room, listening to Rusanowsky call the action, getting more exhilarated with every San Jose goal. When it became clear that my team (yes, by this time the Sharks were my team) was not going to just beat the Evil Empire on their home ice, but absolutely paste them, I remember being so elated that I felt that I was about to float up off the floor.
(It was around this time that I made this purchase.)
The game had significance beyond settling a personal score for me. It, and every other game on the schedule as winter turned to spring (an imperceptible change in temperate northern California, by the way) now had genuine playoff implications. Indeed, the Sharks had successfully put the '92-'93 season and the horrible start to the '93-'94 campaign behind them, and were now firmly in the running for the franchise's first ever playoff spot.
When the last game had been played, the Sharks had managed to finish eighth out of twelve teams in the Western Conference, good enough for a cameo playoff appearance as Speed Bump #1 between the hundred-point Detroit Red Wings and the Stanley Cup. The fact that San Jose was so badly outmatched in the first round didn't really matter, to Sharks fans...just getting to the playoffs was an accomplishment to be proud of.
Then this happened...
It was one of the biggest upsets in the history of hockey. I'll talk a little more about how it went down in my next post.
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