The Temporarily Happy Masochists Society

One hockey article that endures in my mind is this (unfortunately long paywalled) Washington Post piece from 8 years ago, entitled "If you get emotionally invested in a playoff hockey team, you're a masochist". The title gives you the gist of the piece. Hockey is essentially competitive slightly weighted coin-flipping. Sometimes your team plays better but still loses. You have no effect on that outcome, but somehow you let it dictate your whole mood for hours, maybe days. Only a masochist would continue to choose to do this.

I often find myself thinking, "If emotional investment in a playoff team is masochism, how much worse is emotional investment in a perennial non-playoff team?" After all, there haven't been many highs since 2017. I can think of, off the top of my head, the Bobby Ryan return from rehab hat-trick, the Brady Tkachuk "Who Wants It?" game against the Red Wings, and Dylan Ferguson making 48 saves to win his first NHL start. It's mostly been bleak as a Sens fan. We tie our feelings of self-worth to something that, for at least the past 7 years, has given us a lot more sadness than hope. I sat silently for a long time on the couch after the Sens lost Round 3 Game 7 in 2017. I left work early the day Erik Karlsson was traded. We've watched Karlsson, then Duchene, Stone, Pageau, DeBrincat get traded to avoid watching them walk for nothing. We've watched as Chris Driedger, Filip Gustavsson, Joey Daccord, even Cam Talbot have been disappointments in Ottawa only to find noticeable success when they leave. It's painful. I know it's going to be painful, and that doesn't less then pain when it comes.

So, why do we all choose masochism? The easy answer, as I explain to many of my non-sports-fan friends, is that we don't have a choice. We sell our souls to a team before we're even aware of what we're doing, and suddenly we live or die by the success of this team that we have no control over. We develop our superstitions — we don't wash or wear clothes, we avoid specific paths, we eat McDonald's every day for months — because of some cosmic belief that, if we don't, it will mess up the team's vibes and cost them a game and then we'll all be sad. We don't choose this life, it sneaks up on us.

But I also think there's a deeper answer than that: it is actually really fun. The camaraderie of sports fandom is unexplainable. Yes, you end up with toxic corners of every fandom, but having someone in Miami or Gothenburg stop me to say Go Sens Go because they saw my hat is fun. Meeting up with strangers just to watch the Sens game gave me some great friends in Calgary. I remember watching the 2007 Cup run at various friends' houses. I remember being so stoked after the 2013 Game 3 stomping of the Habs that I found Silver Seven commenters who were also in Toronto to head to a bar downtown to watch Game 4. The highs are some of the weirdest, unexpected, great moments, and we live for the next time we get to share one. I daresay the highs are more memorable than the lows. I remember the best moments much more clearly than the devastation, made all the better by building on the years of heartbreak.

Which brings me to this season. I came into the season saying I was expecting nothing, then the Sens won Game 1 and I threw that out the window and got invested. I'll admit I was ornery when the Sens lost five in a row (shown in the one recap I did). But, right now, things feel good. After all, the Sens are 8-2-1 in their last 11. That's a good record even for a really good team. And you can feel it around these parts. ​​The last few recaps have got 40+ comments (I'm sure last night's will get there), and there's almost no arguing. Instead of critiquing bottom-six lineup decisions, we're celebrating bottom-six lineup decisions. Trevor's Links, News, and Notes from Monday is over 70 comments; a couple weeks ago, a good LNN was getting 20 comments. It's just way more fun to participate when there are positive things to talk about.

I'm under no illusions that this will last forever. We'll have more cold streaks soon enough and bemoan this team that keeps making us sad. We'll question third-pairing defencemen choices and suggest impossible trades to fix things. But let's celebrate this feeling while we have it. Often the Wednesday longform is more of an intellectual piece, and there will be lots more longforms this season to dig into stats and strategies and depth charts and tactics. Sometimes though it's nice to write about hockey on a purely emotional level. You, our readers, have made suffering through many letdowns a bit more enjoyable, and now I'm enjoying getting the first shot in many years to instead just be excited in the comments. We're still masochists for choosing to be Sens fans, but for the time being, we get to be happy.