Hi Everyone,
        I posted this article last year and I thought I would post it again.
This article not be taken that I mean the best team did not win because I
believe they did.
        This story appeared in the _Bangor Daily News_ sometime in April of 1992.
(I'm sorry I don't have the exact date.)
       I really liked it and I hope some of you do
too.
        The story was written by Leigh McCarthy a free-lance
columnist who lives in Bangor.  All credit goes to her.
 
 
                        SOMETIMES THE BEST TEAM LOSES
        Why do I care?
        The season's been over for weeks now.
        What difference does it make if the college hockey team I follow
lost out at the championship showdown in March?
        Did the sky fall? It did not.  Did the cosmos shudder? Hardly.
Was life in any real way altered because the team I track all winter
never made it to Albany for the NCAA tournament? No.
        I'm trying to figure it out.  A dark disappointment in my
innards, right about where my appendix should be, thumps each time I
remember what happened to my team.  I have a newly acquired sigh that
breathes itself ruefully and involuntarily out whenever I think on what
might have been.  And I am sorry for my team in that paralyzed, painful
way parents have of being sorry when they are required to stand by and
watch their offspring do battle with the vagaries of blunt reality.
        How I could get so attached to the hockey fortunes of a bunch of
young strangers is the damnedest thing.
        Eleven years ago I first began to pay attention to the hockey
team at the university.  In the beginning the game was a flying riddle.
But I got to know  the rules.  I learned to identify players by number.
I got so I could predict which opponents regularly would play chippy,
which fast, which with distinguised finesse.
        My team evolved over the years.  Players left.  New recruits
joined.  A new coach arrived.  The team's karma burgeoned.  Winning
became a habit.
        It all got pretty heady.
        Still, I never quite got used to the ultimately ritualized yearly
expectation that the team would wind up its season amoung collegiate
hockey's Final Four.  I never could come to take that for granted.  Every
year the team earned a chance to play for the national championship
seemed a great gift.
        There's a reason for that.  By the time a person gets to be my
age she knows too well how may wrenches are out there waiting to throw
themselves into a championship season.  She knows how hard it is to get
to a tournament and how much harder still to win.
        A championship season means more than winning hockey games.  To
earn a championship a team has to beat not only all the other teams but
fate as well.
        So much time and attention is lavished on statistics of sport a
casual observer might think the appeal of college hockey lies in
plus/minus calculations, in points accrued and goals-against averages, in
the win/loss column.  But the ultimate appeal of hockey, like that of any
sport cannot be  transformed to numbers on a newspaper page.  It lies in
that soul place from which mortals dare to gather as a force and move
against the vagaries of reality, from which we dare together to go up
against fate.
        We watchers don't attach to a team's numbers.  We attach to its
collective heart.
        Last week Ann Arbor students trashed their surroundings after
their University of Michigan basketball team lost its championship game
with Duke.  In their frenzy to refute the too-terrible implications of
obvious failure in an extension of themselves, they roared.  People got
hurt.  It was a painful misapprehension and easy to fall into.
        Those of us more honed by life, though, never roar when a team
loses, even if it's our team, the one we follow, the one to which we attach.
There's nothing like experience to demostrate how meanly the vagaries of
reality can toy with skill and preparation and natural ability.
        Sometimes the best team wins, but sometimes it doesn't.  Winning
isn't exactly the same thing as being the best.  It's a more jagged
notion than that.  Winning is a zigzag between skill and fate.
        And if winning doesn't measure as much as it might appear, losing
doesn't measure as little.  Losing is just the other half of the zigzag
battle between skill and fate.
        We  who are already honed know how disorder can intervene in the
universe.  What might have been a close call becomes a rolling puck that
jiggles itself quicker that reason behind a stretching goalie's leg to
rack up a quirk of an enemy goal.  Sometimes, even when everything else
seems as if it ought to be right, he tumblers on a winning combination
just don't fall into place.
        I know that.  I'm as honed as the next guy.  I understand how
fate's tumblers stuck for my hockey team.  But what I am trying to
understand, if I know that, is why I care and why it is so hard to lose
that last game.
        I believe it is because I'm afraid the young strangers whose team
I follow will take their loss to much to heart.
        I'm afraid they don't yet know that fate is still in the process
of teaching them how the cynosure in victory is in fact thanksgiving.  I
wish I could be sure they understand that some season when they have
worked, when their skill is practiced and their determination fixed, the
tumblers will fall into place.  It will happen.
        When it does, the young strangers who play hockey I watch will
remember how easy it was for the stars to whirl accomplishments out of
the clutches of their control.  And in their gratitude that the zigzag
teeth of fate finally let them pass by to reach what they have earned
they will find the championship, when it comes, the sweetest thing.
 
 
 
Sarah Foster
Maine Black Bear in Baltimore.