When­ever I detour from my usual rou­tine, life can feel pretty dis­ori­ent­ing.  Fri­day, I was at work sort­ing through thou­sands of mind-numbing spread­sheets; mere hours later I was stand­ing behind Al Sharp­ton in the air­port secu­rity line, en route to Detroit and my first ever Stan­ley Cup Finals game.  Was this an omi­nous sign?  The Rev­erend Al may have only given me a curt nod (I resisted the urge to call him Jesse Jack­son), but it could not dampen my anx­ious excite­ment for the next 24 hours.

Since the Red Wings’ series tying loss in Game 4, I had been view­ing the week­end trip with increas­ing appre­hen­sion.  With two con­sec­u­tive wins, the Pitts­burgh Pen­guins had com­pletely seized the series’ momen­tum.  More impor­tantly, their two super­stars, Evgeni Malkin and Sid­ney Crosby, had started to roll.  Tal­ly­ing eight points between them in the two vic­to­ries, they had regained the dom­i­nant form that car­ried the team through the first three rounds of the play­offs.  So even though my first ever trip to Joe Louis Arena was a per­sonal mile­stone, I still feared the whole expe­ri­ence was going to be ruined by a dis­ap­point­ing loss in a piv­otal game 5 (14 of the 19 teams that have won game 5 in tied series have even­tu­ally hoisted the cup).  I fig­ured my expe­ri­ence could mir­ror Clark Gris­wold’s in Vaca­tion when he finally reached Wal­ley World, only to find it closed for renovation.

A twist head­ing into the game was the return of the Red Wings lead­ing scorer Pavel Dat­syuk who had missed the end of the Chicago series and the first four games of the Stan­ley Cup finals with a foot (or hip) injury.  Dat­syuk, a puck-handling wiz­ard, is the most impor­tant piece in the Red Wings pos­ses­sion offense.  The Wings had still fin­ished off the Black­hawks and taken two games from the Pen­guins with­out him in the lineup, but the offense—the power play in particular—had been notice­ably less smooth and relied more on fast break oppor­tu­ni­ties and goalie mis­cues.  How­ever, an injury that keeps a star hockey player out for seven games in the play­offs has to be pretty seri­ous and it would be a major risk for the team to rush him back into action too soon.  The on-ice matchups are always impor­tant in hockey, but they are espe­cially impor­tant in this series against the likes of Crosby and Malkin.  Any player skat­ing at a slowed pace due to injuries could cre­ate the oppor­tu­nity for dan­ger­ous mis­matches and break­aways like those seen in the pre­vi­ous game.  It would be heart­en­ing to the team and fans to have their star player, and Hart Tro­phy (MVP) can­di­date, back on the ice, but at what cost?

As every hockey fan knows, watch­ing a play­off game on TV can be a stress­ful expe­ri­ence.  Each time the oppo­nent gets the puck near the net, your heart leaps into your throat and you auto­mat­i­cally expect, or at least fear, the worst.  Those emo­tions increase expo­nen­tially when watch­ing the game live.  The Pen­guins started off well con­trol­ling the puck for the first few min­utes and Malkin just missed on a scor­ing oppor­tu­nity.  A Detroit penalty caused the first stop­page of play seven min­utes into the period, and by then I felt like I had sud­denly aged in dog years (for a while, it seemed the period would only take twenty min­utes to com­plete).  It was not until 13:32 of the first period that my heart rate was able to relax ever so slightly.  On a break down the ice, winger Dan Cleary received a feed from Dat­syuk (who else?) and fired a wrist shot at the top of the cir­cle that beat Pen­guins’ goalie Marc-Andre Fleury.  It gave the Red Wings the cru­cial early lead, and also returned my abil­ity to breathe for the first time all game.  The remain­der of the period passed with­out any other major event and at the inter­mis­sion I was thank­ful for the oppor­tu­nity to sit back and calm down.  When it feels like a fist is clench­ing my heart the last thing I want is to eat, drink, or stand in a bath­room line—although I may have been will­ing to wait in line for a quick mas­sage to ease my ner­vous twitch­ing.

Con­sid­er­ing my ear­lier obser­va­tion of how rad­i­cally one’s sur­round­ings and sit­u­a­tion can change in a mat­ter of hours, I sup­pose the dif­fer­ence one hockey period can make should not be at all shock­ing.  Dur­ing the first inter­mis­sion, I was won­der­ing if it was pos­si­ble for a healthy 24-year old to suf­fer a heart attack as I strug­gled to catch my breath.  By the sec­ond inter­mis­sion, I was relaxed and cheer­ful.  The cause was a Red Wings four goal explo­sion in the sec­ond period that forced Pens’ goalie Marc-Andre Fleury to be benched, half the Pen­guins squad to lose their cool, and the entire build­ing to explode in eupho­ria.  Sim­ply put, Pitts­burgh con­tin­ued com­mit­ting penal­ties and Detroit kept scor­ing.  The puck hardly came near (ahem, prepar­ing my Barry Mel­rose voice) Wings’ net­min­der Chris Osgood the entire period—which nat­u­rally was the end of the arena where I was sit­ting.  It was as if the hockey gods had pity on me and were doing every­thing in their power to cause as lit­tle stress as pos­si­ble.  Maybe Detroit’s octo­pus tra­di­tion is actu­ally some form of rit­u­al­is­tic sac­ri­fice aimed at appeas­ing them.

A rel­a­tively unevent­ful third period raced by, and before I knew it, my very first Stan­ley Cup game was com­plete.  In a mat­ter of hours I had gone from tight chested to light headed.  I had begun the day think­ing that this could turn out to be a dark spot in my young adult­hood and now I can not wait for Game 6 on Tues­day.  Addi­tion­ally, I had ven­tured from home that morn­ing never hav­ing graced the pres­ence Al Sharpton’s hair.  Now I am a witness.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFZU8qKtssI]