Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Kayleigh Donaldson | Miscellaneous | October 3, 2025
A couple of years ago, I bought my dad tickets to an ice hockey game as a Christmas present. Neither of us had been to a match before, and my excitement for sports typically begins and ends with the Olympics. It seemed like a cool gift idea, and a chance to try out a local thing I'd never done before. The presence of a professional ice hockey team in Dundee, the Stars, had always fascinated me. It just seemed weird that we had this. Anyway, I took my dad, and he mostly enjoyed it but had trouble keeping up with the puck. It wasn't love at first game for me, but I had enough fun with it that I decided to go to another game, this time on my own. Then another, then another. And now I go to games frequently, keep up with NHL statistics, went to the Hockey Hall of Fame during my trip to TIFF, own a few hockey romance novels, and send memes about Austin Matthews to my friends.
Sh*t. I'm a sports fan now. It actually happened.
My evolution into a full-on ice hockey stan has been one of the more unexpected changes in my life, and one that's greatly entertained my friends and family. But they're also getting hooked too, partly because I've dragged them to enough games that they've stopped pretending they're doing it begrudgingly (my local team also sells donuts and beer, so that helps.) It's surprised me too. I previously thought of myself as someone for whom sports were generally a non-entity. I don't keep up with any other profession or teams outside of this one. There was no antipathy towards, say, football or rugby, simply a lack of passion. This one, though, is different, and I've spent too much time trying to figure out why.
First, I think ice hockey is just an easy sport to get into. It's not overladen with complicated rules or jargon. There are two teams, two nets, and one puck. Get the puck into the net and the team with the most goals wins. Everything else, you can pick up as you watch (behold the glory/horror of the empty net.) The simplicity of the set-up is key. So is the sheer sensory overload of it all. As someone whose brain never stops and loves to descend into doom spirals, I am drawn to activities and experiences where my mind has no choice but to focus on one thing: frantic exercise courses, dense novels, subtitled cinema, and foreign language classes. With ice hockey, everything is loud and fast and non-stop, and it consumes me in the best way. Bye bye, anxiety, I have to watch some large Canadian men thwack a puck at the glass (I'd also be lying if I didn't say that all of the fighting and goon sh*t was part of the appeal for me. Sorry, it's too funny.)
There is something to be said about getting into a sport. It makes you both a strategist and a mystic. You become fascinated by numbers and skills, but start worrying that the jersey you wore to that one game where your team lost badly is potentially cursed. You start seeing the same faces at every game and having silent rapport with fellow fans, picking up the player-specific chants and wondering if anyone else wants the lady with the vuvuzela to be expelled from the arena (it's an indoor sport, guys, knock that sh*t off!) The routines and traditions become cozily familiar. You act like the mascot isn't just some guy in a polar bear suit. Granted, my local experience is probably more akin to, say, a minor league team fandom than the NHL. Such is the joy of supporting a team that plays out of the same ice rink that locals hire out for kids' birthday parties and curling practice. But with that comes a tight-knit appeal that can't be replicated on a larger scale.
Being an ice hockey fan in a country where it's a niche sport is different experience altogether. A lot of the nasty bullsh*t that tends to surround sports fandoms of any kind are, if not minimised then certainly less overwhelming in their presence. My small team seems to have a reasonably gender-balanced turnout for games, for instance, which I know is not typically the case for ice hockey. But I'd be lying if I claimed I wasn't desperate to experience an NHL game first-hand. Yes, I made a vexing choice in committing to the Toronto Maple Leafs (I didn't know about the curse when I picked them, okay?!) but I don't regret it. Supporting a nightmare team that hasn't won the Stanley Cup since the year my mother was born is good for building character. So I'm told.
Getting into sport, especially as a woman is to be reminded that the things you love seldom do in return. Watching the updates on the sexual assault case in Canada's main hockey organisation certainly proved that, as did watching 'neutral' reporting on the accused men's potential futures in the NHL. While I was writing this piece, a fan of the Glasgow Clan received a lifetime ban from the entire league for being a racist and xenophobic creep. It's depressingly easy to find stories from people discussing the various kinds of harassment they received while attending games. Even by the racist standards of major sports leagues, ice hockey is astonishingly white and conservative-coded. Immersing yourself in your new favourite thing means being endlessly confronted with this bullsh*t, as well as the disheartening lack of progress in changing it. Granted, most major sports organizations have proven time and time again that they'll take money and schmoozing with the right-wing over not being garbage, but I feel it most palpably in my new hobby. Typical.
But I do find watching and engaging in ice hockey to be a real joy in my life. I like its kinetic energy, the roar of the crowd, and all the ways that it's become a thing I can enjoy both on my own and with the people I love. I like checking out the surrounding ephemera and delving into the history. I like seeing how fans convey their own appreciation, be it through romance novels or colourful at-game signs or comedic commentary. I like the trash talk and fights. I like watching a thing that I know with 100% certainty I could never do myself. If life is all about balancing the hot with the cold, finding pleasure in a messy thing feels like a good way to level things out.
But seriously, Leafs, can we stop choking? Pretty please? Statistically speaking, you have to get to the finals again at some point, surely?
