The Ottawa Senators are Making Me Tired

I have been feeling tired a lot lately.

There are some obvious causes. For one, I am the father of two children under the age of four and I have a bad habit of staying up past what one might consider a reasonable bedtime for someone in my position. Three year olds don't sleep in, you see, no matter how much you ask them to "just give Daddy three more minutes". I'm also still committed to playing beer league hockey, and our games can get started as late as 1130 PM on Wednesday nights. Truthfully, it might not be all that hard after all to figure out why I'm fatigued.

These days, the Ottawa Senators are also making me tired. I've been writing about the team for long enough, and have been a fan for much longer than that even, to know that the regular season is a marathon and that you have to be able to ride the highs and the lows. Even as the best version of themselves, this team wasn't destined to be a Stanley Cup contender. There was, and I think remains, a consensus that the Sens would be in the thick of the play-off battle all season long. Due to the East's general ineptitude, Ottawa remains just two points out of a play-off spot. All is not lost.

And yet.

I missed part of last night's game while I was running errands but what I did manage to see just kind of made me tired. I don't think there's a better word for it. I'm not mad, I'm not even disappointed, I'm just...tired. Beata summed things up nicely in her intro to last night’s recap:

I don’t even know, guys.

It’s November. The Sens are doing what they always do in November. Are they actually as bad as their recent record suggests? No. Will that matter? Probably not. They haven’t tanked their season yet, but given how this usually goes, I think we’re all allowed to panic as much as we want until they end the month in a playoff spot.

If you're at all familiar with my writing on this site, you'll know that I lean heavily towards a "process-over-results" mindset. By the numbers, the Sens have a lot going for them. Last night's game was a definitive stinker, but they haven't had too many of those. All in, their record probably doesn't do justice to their play. At some point, though, when we are in Year 3 of trying to be good after four years of being deliberately awful, and it's going on eight years without a play-off birth? Well, I'm getting a bit tired of moral victories.

In his media availability after last night's defeat, captain Brady Tkachuk had this to say:

Back in August, I wrote a brief little post about how it was time to get excited again. I'm not ready to abandon that yet, but damn if this doesn't feel all too familiar. I want to be excited. Right now I'm just kind of tired. I promise I'll try to go to bed earlier and, in return, I need the Ottawa Senators to just get out of November with some excitement left to spare.