Some thoughts to help kill time before the next round of play-offs.
 
First, thanks to all you writers who love the game and have communicated
that enthusiasm in game reports since late October when I started reading
the stuff on the list.
 
The perception has grown slowly that, at fifty, I'm pretty old for this
readership (this friendly core circle of self-deprecating hockey nuts),
or at least old for those who send in posts. I did not expect that reading
the daily logs--some days it's like cleaning the stables--would make me feel
old. But it has, and this has made me wonder if hockey in this country, like
MTV, is only for the young.
 
Following this line of thought, it occurs to me that we will not get the
exposure and the sport will not grow and, in growth, touch deeper down into
the American psyche (:-)) until it survives, as a love, into our older age
brackets.
 
It worries me that college hockey is maybe a spectator sport you simply
grow out of by getting older, by getting more serious--in contrast to the
way baseball certainly, but even basketball and football attract the
attention (the reminiscences, the reverie) of old-timers.
 
Here I am in South Carolina, of course, and what can I know? Test this up
there in the north, as I here cannot. Look around you on game night. Are
there older folks in the stands. (How about at NHL, AHL, IHL, etc., games?
Any different?) And who's watching college hockey telecasts?--I mean their
ages.
 
Is there anyone out there on the list older than me? Or as old? Just a quick
demographic take. (Reply off the list, and yes I know about Hank Ketcham and
the old guy leagues. I wish I lived near one.)
 
Or maybe the issue is not college hockey but, in the case of Hockey-L,
computer familiarity. Is it mainly the young who use the net or join lists
or spend hours reading everything because they have grown up with computers
(and my generation hasn't) and have more time on their hands? :-) Would
this explain what I am sensing?
 
Greater computer know-how may be a factor, but I don't think it entirely
explains what I'm getting at. Which is: why can't hockey (college hockey in
particular) hold more appeal for the older crowd? Why does it seem from the
postings on the list that it's often a matter of kids in the student section
thinking up nifty jeer choruses and hating and baiting the all-too-human refs?
 
Was that a low blow? Apologies.
 
Item: There's a *game* out there on the ice, a game of infinitely variable,
gracefully executed passing and positioning, punctuated by heartening
collisions and vivid displays of stickhandling and shooting skills. Again
I want to say (reinforcing) thanks to those who report in vivid detail,
so that it comes alive, the action of games you watch and I can't. Thanks.
It has been a great season (my first on the list), and I thought I had lost
it for good when I moved south twenty years ago.
 
Visualize the old fart writing this gibberish? Think of Tim Taylor. He was
a year ahead of me in college. Actually I smile a little though.
 
Kevin