We Are the Champions!

I admit it—hockey has never been my number one sport. That in itself is odd, since I’m a native New Englander and lived the first eleven years of my life in rural Vermont with a small river behind our house that froze over every winter. My brother, my Dad and I skated a lot (I learned to skate before I learned to ski, which is my real winter love) and often played three-person hockey (I’ll leave to you to figure out how that works). I grew up in pre-cable days, and we got only three television stations with the huge antenna on our roof. One of them was from Montreal (our closet big city), and we watched broadcasts of “Hockey Night in Canada” twice a week, featuring either the Montreal Canadians or the Toronto Maple Leafs, depending on who was playing that evening. This was in prehistoric times when there were only six NHL teams (no dilution of talent in those days), so often the opponent would be our beloved Boston Bruins (I am genetically a fan of all Boston/Southern New England sports teams). But weak ankles and flat feet made me a mediocre skater at best and once I moved from New England after high school, not returning to live for twenty years, my interest in hockey waned. They don’t do a lot of hockey in New Mexico, Florida, Wyoming or Tennessee—a few of the states I lived in during my absence from New England—or at least not enough for me to notice.

I returned to New England in the 1990s with the family when I was hired to teach philosophy at Providence College. I made it clear at my job interview that one of the many attractive features about PC for me, were I to be hired, would be Division One sports. My future colleagues thought I was kidding—but I wasn’t. My sport fanaticism is well established for anyone who knows me (and anyone who reads this blog), and I have held two season tickets to Friar basketball for all twenty-one years I’ve been here, missing only a handful of home games in twenty-one seasons. I also noticed that PC has a hockey team and an on-campus arena within ten minutes walking distance of our house—but in college sports it has been all college basketball all the time for me my whole adult life. But that might be changing . . .

This academic year has been a spectacular success for PC athletics. Our men’s soccer team made the NCAA Final Four in the fall before being eliminated on a fluke goal. One of our distance runners set the national record, then won the NCAA championship in the 3000 meters. Our men’s basketball team made the NCAA tournament for the second year in a row for the first time in more than twenty years. Running parallel to their season, just slightly above my sports radar, the men’s hockey team was putting a fine season together. Ranked in the top ten nationally in the preseason polls, they started a bit slowly but ended up second in their tough league, hosting the New Hampshire Wildcats for a Friday-Sunday best-two-out-of-three series as they opened the playoffs. I saw two of the games, including the Sunday game they lost in overtime which knocked them out of the playoffs. “They look tired,” I thought, assuming that their season was over. I was wrong.

A few days later, the Friars basketball team, sixth-seeded in the NCAA tournament, chose a poor time to have one of their worst games of the year and were beaten by eleventh-seeded Dayton. There was a lot of injustice involved—as the better seed we had to play them at a venue a mere fifty miles from their campus, the referees were out of control, indiscriminately calling a flagrant foul on our star player in the first two minutes of the game, a technical on the coach toward the end of the game that an ESPN analyst called “the stupidest call I’ve ever seen”—in short, it was a very bad night. Assuming that winter sports were over for the year, I resigned myself to giving a crap about what the Red Sox were doing in spring training.

When I heard that the hockey team might sneak into the NCAAs by the skin of their teeth if things broke favorably in the finals of other league tournaments, I made sure to watch the selection show on ESPNU. And sure enough, we did make it in—the last team selected to the sixteen-team field. Then in the first of a series of signs that the hockey gods were smiling favorably, we were placed in the Providence regional as a four seed, playing literally a mile away from campus at the Dunkin’ Donuts Center. “Sounds good to me,” I thought, entirely forgetting my outrage a few days earlier at the injustice of the basketball team having to play a worse-seeded team close to their campus. I purchased tickets for the Friday and Sunday sessions, grateful for the chance to be a fanatic for a little bit longer.

And thus began a journey that only the most the most dedicated Friar fanatic could have predicted. First the number one seed Miami of Ohio went down in one of the craziest hockey games I’ve ever seen, then second-seeded Denver bit the dust on Sunday. This was a completely different team than the tired looking squad I watched a couple of weeks earlier. “These guys aren’t playing like they are glad to have made the tournament,” I said to Jeanne after one of the games. “They’re playing like they intend to win the whole thing.” Focus, energy, team work, discipline—and they appeared to really be having fun. The crowd was great with the dancing Friar out of control, the band blasting in my ears just a few rows behind, and the best student section I’d ever seen at a Friar sporting event. I was high-fiving strangers all around me as the Friars scored goal after goal.

In the almost two weeks between their regional championship and the Frozen Four in Boston, I had plenty of time to think about why this run was making me so happy, beyond my usual pleasure when a team I root for is doing well. Several guys on the team are my former students. One of the top forwards and the back-up goalie were in my DWC seminars both semesters last academic year. They worked hard (usually). They ran contrary to stereotype and came prepared, ready to participate. They sat in the back row during lecture, where they tried to get away with checking out their phones during class until I threatened to confiscate their devices. All of them were normal students, in other words, good guys now getting ready to make a run for glory never matched by any previous Friar team. This was my team, our team, and everyone was psyched.

Hockey fans and Friar fans know what happened. The Friars dominated Nebraska-Omaha so thoroughly in the semifinal game that only a spectacular performance by the opposing goalie kept it from becoming a rout. The final against mighty Boston University, college hockey royalty of the highest order, was probably the most tense three hours of sports I have ever sweated through. A third period for the ages, marked by a fluke goal straight from hockey Olympus to tie the game, one of the prettiest goals you’ll ever see two minutes later to take the lead, and perhaps the greatest hockey save I’ve ever witnessed by our goalie in the final minute to seal the deal. Priceless.

At the on-campus celebration at the hockey arena on Tuesday, it was clear that for everyone involved, from the college president who is as huge a sports fan as I, to our brilliant athletic director who bleeds black and white, to the students, faculty and administrators, to our fabulous coach, to the fans and to the players themselves, this is still a “pinch me—I’m dreaming moment.” But it’s real. Queen was right—we are the champions. Pinch me—I’m dreaming!

Friars sing “We Are the Champions”