Time to Get Excited Again
A brief meditation on pre-season excitement
On Tuesday, the Ottawa Senators' Instagram account posted a little hype video. Sure it was less than a minute long, but for content-starved fans it was a soothing balm. Have I watched it (conservatively) more than twenty times already, parsing each frame for deeper meaning like it's the Zapruder Film? Maybe! Who are you to judge me, fellow Sens Sicko that is reading a team blog on August 21st?!
Some highlights:
Thomas Chabot appears to be healthy!
Jake Sanderson looks absolutely ripped!
Anton Forsberg is there!
Just kidding. Forsberg seems like a cool dude and the Sens will need him to have a big bounce back season if they are going to qualify for the play-offs. I bear no ill will against this man. We're just making light-hearted jokes here.
Regardless, the Sens' social media team knows exactly what they are doing when they post this type of content. Hockey fans absolutely love videos of the players from their favourite teams working out. I won't get into how that desire sometimes gets twisted into fans believing they can ascertain whether a player is working hard enough in the off-season through their social media posts, but the popularity of the genre is undeniable. It's not normally my cup of tea, but damn if I didn't sit up a little straighter when Sanderson threw that medicine ball into the stratosphere at the end of the clip. It's a good indication of how primed I feel for the season to get started.
One of the reasons that Silver Seven continues to this day is that I desperately want to write about this team, for this community, when it's actually good. Eighteen months ago, when I was told that SB Nation would be pulling the plug, it would have been easy enough to call it a day. Part of my desire to persevere was informed by a sense that better days were ahead. In my now over 10 years of writing for this site, the Sens have been in the play-offs on just two occasions – and the last time was seven whole years ago. In the interim, we've spilled a lot of digital ink on the topic of some (mostly) very bad hockey. It felt wrong to walk away from the project just when the pay-off was about to hit. Last season didn't quite deliver on that front, but I can't help but feel optimistic about the upcoming season already.
Was it really worth spending more than 500 words on a twenty second video from the Sens' Instagram account? I'll let the reader be the judge of that. But what I will say is that getting excited for the Sens in August reminds me of why we keep doing what we're doing here. Just one month until the Sens are playing their first pre-season game against the Toronto Maple Leafs. I can't wait.
