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Puck Boston Bruins

November 24th, 2009 admin No comments

Puck Boston Bruins
How did you get interested in hockey?

I'm feeling sentimenltal today. I want to know in detail how you first got interested in hockey, and what your experience was at your first nhl game, if you've ever been to one.

Here's my story if you're interested:
A friend of the family who was hudge hockey fan from way back and had even played in Germany got us into it. We really didn't like sports of any kind, especially hockey. Bill, (the friend) had been diagnosed with luekimia and was in the hospital. I was watching tv, just flipping though the channels when I came upon the Avs playing the Bruins. Bill was originally from Boston so this interested me. I watched the remainer of the game and really didn't get it. I though the players looked like a bunch of kittens fighting over toys when the puck went into the corners. But a few days later I wached anouth game and I was hooked. While we were at our first game, Bill passed away at home. It was so ironic.

I'm gonna type out this long answer once, so then I'll just copy/paste it to whoever else asks the question in the future, here goes:

I was at home one day, flipping through channels on my TV. This was during the 2000-01 regular season. As I was flipping through the channels I saw this guy on Sportscenter and they were interviewing him about his comeback. That guy was Mario Lemieux, and he was coming out of retirement. It was a Sportscenter special report and they told his life story, about how he was drafted #1, and how he scored his first goal on his first shift on his first shot. How he brought two Stanley Cups to the Pittsburgh Penguins, how he struggled with cancer. They told the story of how he was in radiation therapy for 3 months. For a whole 3 months he layed in his bed getting blasted by radiation rays, yet on the final day of therapy, when it was finished, he went straight from the hospital to the Penguins game. They were playing the Flyers and Lemieux scored a goal and had an assist in his first game back, right out of the hospital. That story was so dramatic, I was amazed at the will power of that man. Then they said that after being retired for 4 years, he was going to make a comeback, and after that I started watching hockey games in hopes of seeing him play. Sadly, I missed his first game back, but I started watching hockey after that.

So, Lemieux turned me on to hockey, his comeback kind of told me that hockey exists here. But what really made me a true, hardcore, hockey fan, was the Avs' Stanley Cup run that same season when Lemieux came back. As I started watching more hockey games, I realized that most of the games involved a team called the Colorado Avalanche. I went to the library, got some books, read up on them. I read in the paper about Ray Bourque, who had never won a Cup before and how the team was trying to win it for him. That got me hooked. The goalie was Patrick Roy, and I always wanted to be a goalie and always played goalie, so Roy became my favorite player right away. I got some books on him, read them, found out that he "talks to goal posts" (although that turned out to be false), and his famous Jeremy Roenick quote. He played with fire and emotion, and I really liked that. After his shutout in game 6 of the Stanley Cup final, he became my favorite player along with Mario Lemieux. I mean, the Devils were playing at home, the Stanley Cup was in the arena, they could have won it that night, yet Patrick Roy shut them out, I was hooked after that. Then the Avs went on to win game 7 at home, Sakic gave Bourque the Cup, and the rest is history....... After that, I got 2 of my cousins involved in hockey, we all watched the games, and we played street hockey every single day for about 8 hours each day. Those were good times back then...

So yeah, Mario Lemieux and his comeback introduced me to the sport of hockey. Patrick Roy and the Avs' Cup run got me addicted to the sport of hockey. That is why Mario Lemieux and Patrick Roy are my two favorite players of all time, and that will probably never change.

I'm sorry that Bill guy passed away, that must have been horrible to come back home from a hockey game and to find something like that out