I’m not going to break any new ground with this uncontroversial statement: 2020 was a pretty weird year. There was some good that came out of it, certainly. Babies were born, families came together, heck, my brother went out and got married. I loved spending way more time with my kids than I ever would have been able to in a normal year, and I was able to avoid driving to work every day since March. On its balance, though, 2020 will appropriately be remembered for how terrible it has been.
It was divisive, disruptive and tragic. There was the Pandemic, of course, and an election in the United States that continued to threaten to tear the country asunder. Canada and the US have the longest unmilitarized border in the world, and things were so bad this year that even that border was closed. Save for maybe New Zealand, every nation, every industry, and every human being was profoundly impacted.
Let me tell you, it was very difficult to satirize anything. Sure, hockey had a lot of weird things happen, but it’s much easier to comment on a strange thing happening in an otherwise strange time. If anything, the NHL’s response was among the best of all sports leagues, with a safe conclusion to their season, tucked safely away in Canada. Their trials and tribulations mirror those of the world around them, rather than incompetence by the league.
With that in mind, instead of hackneyed replication of other hockey sites in the NHL coverage here, most relevant topics were hashed over by writers the world over. The NHL’s problems were the same as the rest of us, and they have been covered exhaustively. I have a lot on my mind, but really, there isn’t much to add that hasn’t been said already, by everyone, hockey community or not.
I tried my hand at satire early on in this pandemic, and people — important people — thought it was real news. That’s how messed up this year has been. It’s late December, and we are still two weeks from a hockey season, and now 4 days from a New Year. Let’s hope hockey can be hockey again soon, and not an analogy for the crumbling civilization as we know it.
There is going to be a team called the Kraken, for Christ’s sake. We can’t let this go, but this wasn’t the year to get bent out of shape over it.
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