Congrats Bruins, you made me eat my words

I made a very bold statement a few weeks ago – one that I was sure was true: “Maybe the Bruins will come back to beat the Canadiens in the first round; maybe they’ll even make it to the conference championship – but they won’t win the Cup, and all of the fans, bandwagon or not, will be disappointed in the end.”

Well, I’m eating my words. Last week, they proved me wrong by winning the Stanley Cup for the first time since 1972, and doing it in impressive fashion. 

I won’t give you a run-down of their Stanley Cup run – their three Game 7 wins, their dominance at home or their epic turnaround after Game 2 in Vancouver, when a Canucks victory parade seemed inevitable. I won’t give you a summary because the Bruins run to Lord Stanley was a strange one for me. I didn’t fully jump back on the bandwagon because, as I said in April, I’ve “lost that loving feeling” for the B’s and I just couldn’t trust them. I tuned into the games and cheered for them to win, but it was all halfhearted because I couldn’t truly invest in something that I was sure had a heartbreaking ending.

Before I was born, the Bruins were IT in Boston. In the 1970s, they were bigger than the Celtics, the Patriots and even the Red Sox. But after the Jacobs Family bought the team, things changed. I assumed I’d never see the Stanley Cup hoisted by the black-and-gold because, well, they’re the Bruins – owned by a man who doesn’t even live in or around Boston (he lives in Buffalo!) and always spent enough money to compete but never enough to win. 

I loved hockey until I was 22. But since 2005, I haven’t truly cared about hockey unless the Bruins or my alma mater, Boston University, made the playoffs – even then, I didn’t really care. So I can’t take as much pleasure in the Bruins Cup win as the die-hards who stuck with them through thick and thin – people like my cousin Shawn, who hasn’t turned on them in his 35 years and has worn a Bruins hat since the day I met him 10 years ago (he is technically my cousin’s husband). When they won Game 7, I was thinking about how happy people like Shawn must be, and wishing I was still one of them. 

One Saturday, the Bruins held their championship parade and it was the biggest parade in Boston history – even bigger than the Red Sox parade in 2004 after their first World Series win in 82 years. The thing about hockey is it fits in Boston – Boston is a tough, working-class city, where the men drink and fight, and the women are just as tough. Hockey is a sport for real men – if you look at someone wrong in the NBA you get a foul; if you blow on the quarterback or a receiver in football you get penalized; but in hockey, players stand up for each other and themselves. 

I grew up loving Ray Bourque, Cam Neely and Adam Oates, but they lost me in the post-Joe Thornton days. Now, kids in Boston are idolizing Tim Thomas, Zdeno Chara, Patrice Bergeron and Milan Lucic in that same way and I think it’s great. I hope they never feel the gut-punch I did when I realized the management didn’t care about the fans.

And I hope those real, true fans like Shawn – who never abandoned the team and always believed this day would come – are enjoying every second of the Stanley Cup being in Boston.

Why I hate the Bruins

It seems to be a recurring theme, but it's something I've been dealing with for a few years - I hate the Boston Bruins.

Let me start from the beginning...

Thanks to a couple of friends, I feel in love with the Bruins when I was 14 (for those of you who don't know, that was in 1997). I grew up in a non-hockey house in Massachusetts, mainly because my dad grew up in Florida, then went to high school in New Jersey. But I met Lauren and Alexa, and suddenly I was watching games, learning player's names, reading the Boston Globe every morning for Bruins stories, and basically becoming a hockey-knowledge sponge.

When I fall for something, I fall hard. I would bring my Walkman with me whenever I left home if there was a game on so I wouldn't miss a minute of the action; when I was at home and the games weren't on TV (this was, sadly, before my parents had NESN, which broadcasts the Bruins games - they righted this travesty quite soon), I would listen in the dark in my bedroom on AM radio; I had posters of Sergei Samsonov and Joe Thornton, I loved Byron Dafoe, PJ Axelsson, and even "the great" Hal Gill. To put it bluntly - I was obsessed.

But over the years, as my wide-eyed optimism and 100% faith in the team began to pale, I began to see a trend - the Bruins not signing free agents unless they came at a bargain; letting go of talented free agents at their peak. It took awhile for me to see the truth, because I didn't want to believe what was staring me in the face. But in 2004, after the Bruins, and the #1 seed, lost to the Montreal Canadiens in the first round of the playoffs , I finally accepted it; I realized what many other already knew but I was too naive to see - the organization cared more about making money than winning the Cup.

The straw that broke the camel's back for me as a Bruins fan was the unthinkable trade of Joe Thornton. The Bruins traded away their captain, their best player, and the face of their franchise, to San Jose (don't even get me started on HOCKEY teams playing in California, Florida, or anywhere else in the South). Then, to make matters 9832481 times worse, at the end of the SAME SEASON he won the MVP Award. WHAT?! Has any (other) team EVER traded away a player who went on to win the MVP in the same season (I'll help you out- the answer isn't yes). It was a travesty - in order to keep from signing Jumbo Joe to a contract he deserved after playing with the team since he was the #1 overall pick at 18 years old, the spineless Harry Sinden traded him so he wouldn't have to pony up the dough, and could get something (even though it was maybe 20 cents on the dollar) in return.

It was like a slap in the face. I'd fallen in love, and after almost 10 years of hard-core dedication, it was like I'd been cheated on and thrown to the curb. How can you care about someone who doesn't care about you back? How can you invest time, money, and you heart into something that won't give you anything in return. Sure, the regular season may show you some good times, but, inevitably in the playoffs, the Bruins will lose in the first round (if they even make it), and the small amount of casual fans who jumped on the Bruins bandwagon as they post-season approached will be back on the sidelines until the following April.

This year was much of the same... the Bruins skated into the playoffs to play their former arch-nemesis, the Montreal Canadiens. They went down 3 games to 1, just as I expected. But then, somehow, they came roaring back to tie the series at 3-3 and head back up to the Great White North to play game 7. Suddenly there was some buzz about the B's, could they really pull this off? Momentum was surely on their side!
But, of course, the Canadiens won the game, and in a 5-0 shutout no less, to shove the nails into the coffin that is the Bruins franchise.