Dear Canucks Nation, we had a great ride

The analogy of one’s love for a sports team is often compared to a bad romance. In some cases being a Canucks fan seems like an abusive relationship and yet we come back. As a die-hard fan you vest so much in the team emotionally and would do anything to assure them a win. In fact, we already do try to affect the outcome of the game with our superstitions and playoff traditions. The worst feeling is that feeling of helplessness when you watch your team get scored on, and again, and you watch the score slip out of reach, but you can’t tear yourself away from the game because there’s always that small chance that if you do you’ll miss that comeback we all believe will happen up until the clock hits zero.

It’s pretty draining to ride the roller coaster wreck of five goals against night in and night out as with each goal for you get refilled with home until the next devastating backhand that goes five hole. It’s an 82 game skid which gets us excited for the second season and after shaving the night before game one we buckle down and schedule our lives around the most important games of the season.

It’s this bad romance that has me standing up for Bertuzzi every single time someone gets on his case for the Moore incident (the most recent of this being versus a Sharks fan who went off during the Sharks/Red Wings Game 5 I attended). It’s this bad romance that has me arguing that Naslund deserves to have his number retired. It’s this bad romance that has me watch a game I know we’re going to lose down to the very last second and it’s this very bad romance which has me defend Luongo in some capacity or another no matter how he plays. It’s this bad romance that allows us to criticize the team for some of it’s largest down falls and flaws, yet the next day stand by them no matter what and it’s this bad romance that has me defending the Canucks decision to have Canucks day when really it’s something that should have been put off until after we win a cup.

We had a great run this year and it was filled with records that the Canucks made fall left, right, and center. While it doesn’t seem like any of it was worth it because of the second round knockout, before we make an abundance of excuses and point the blame at everyone possible, lets celebrate the good times we had. It was a great ride with all of you and while this part of this season is over the beauty of hockey is that with the off season comes the draft, free agency, and of course training camp. Hockey is a 12 month sport and while it may take me a few more days to get over what happened last night there’s always something to look forward to.

We had a great ride this year and I want to thank all of you Canucks fans that stood by us every game and who followed this team to the bitter end. We win as a team and we lose as a team and when we finally win it all as a team, it’ll be worth every single up and down we’ve gone through in the past.