Last week, as I was waiting for the bus with Marlayna (age six), I looked across to the north side of Whyte Avenue and saw the words “THE CHURCH OF CONNOR MCJESUS” painted onto a patio bench. Connor McJesus is, of course, the nickname of the top Edmonton Oilers forward, Connor McDavid. Drafted by the Oilers at the age of eighteen, the fans’ yearning for glory came to focus almost entirely on this young prodigy. Would he prove to be the second coming of a hockey hero, achieving legendary status like the great Wayne Gretzky? Only time would tell.
Looking at that patio bench, I thought to myself, this surely ranks as the very best part of being a fan: this feeling of hope, of being on the verge of a great thing happening. The possibility of the Cup, glimmering in the hands of McDavid in an imagined near-future, can illuminate the smallest moment of even the most banal of days.
As I sat at the bus stop, imagining the Stanley Cup coming to Edmonton, it seemed to me that it would be impossible and futile to ever suppress this kind of yearning. For all of hockey’s faults, which are now well documented—the secret fund used to pay the legal expenses of alleged rapists, the hazing and the bullying, the increasing class exclusivity as the amateur sport prices out all but the affluent, the madness and rage of zealous hockey parents—if you were to take away the bad as well as the good, you would surely need to replace hockey with something else, otherwise there would be an enormous, aching absence in our culture.
While looking at the words, Connor McJesus, carefully painted onto that patio bench, I remembered what Noam Chomsky once said: “One of the functions that things like professional sports play is to offer an area to deflect people’s attention from things that matter, so that the people in power can do what matters without public interference.” There was a time when I happily accepted this insight without any protest in my heart. It aptly describes this world, where it is totally OK for the Oilers to play in one of the grandest and most expensive of all hockey arenas, just a stone’s throw away from one of the deepest pockets of urban poverty in western Canada.
As I considered the possible fate of McDavid, aka McJesus, with Marlayna at my side, my heart was soft and receptive to new ideas. Lord Stanley’s Cup, at that moment, glimmered in my mind, just as it did in the minds of thousands of other members of this “imagined community” of Oilers’ fans. It seemed indisputable to me that the intangible essence of this hope would be very hard to live without. Take all of it away and the world wouldn’t be better. Doubtless, sport is instrumentalized by politicians, not to mention corporations, who would rather we be congregating in the streets by the thousands in support of the Oilers rather than agitating for housing as a basic human right or calling for an end to wars, and so on. Yet sport does not belong to politicians and corporations. It belongs to us.
As the sun beat down on Marlayna and I, sitting there at that bus stop, sharing the bottle of water we had just purchased from the nearby gas station, I thought of Lord Stanley of Preston, the Governor General of Canada, who first became an avid fan of hockey when he was exposed to the sport during Montreal's 1889 Winter Carnival, and who, in 1892, wrote: “I have for some time been thinking that it would be a good thing if there were a challenge cup which should be held from year to year by the champion hockey team in the Dominion [of Canada].”
When the bus trundled toward us, I took a final sip from our shared bottle of water, and I thought to myself, Lord Stanley was correct. The cup is a very good thing. It elevated the sport to a new level of prestige. Well over a century later, the pursuit of the cup provides one of the few meaningful rituals remaining in our secular society. Everyday media discourse reduces humans to mere economic and political animals. We supposedly only care about our pocketbooks, our families, our vehicles, and whether or not Preferred Candidate X prevails over Preferred Candidate Y. This reductive mode of existence makes people unhappy and angry. How satisfying it is to engage in fandom, which delivers no economic or political benefits to us as individuals. How satisfying it is to see grown men say, without a hint of irony, “We believe in each other.” You’re unlikely to hear talk like this in banks, boardrooms and business meetings, and if you do, it’s safe to assume someone is trying to trick you. Only in the sports arena is the sincerity of such sentiments seldom in doubt. In this final series against the Florida Panthers, the Oilers have overcome a deficit of zero games to three, winning three on the trot to draw level. I honestly had a hard time believing this could happen. Yet it did.
Getting up from the bus stop bench with Marlayna, I was thinking of the weekend’s 8-1 victory against Florida that had restored a flickering bunsen burner of hope to my heart. I was grateful to have the Stanley Cup still glimmering on the imagined horizon. Today is a new day. Tonight is a new game. Game Seven. By the end of it, everything will have changed. The cup of hope will overflow for either the Oilers fans or Florida fans.
The bus took us away, down Whyte Avenue. There were flags on buildings and on cars—not the kind of flags that anyone would ever feel the need to tear down. I felt glad that Marlayana has learned to cheer, just as I did during my first year in Canada, “Go Oilers Go!” We will keep on hoping and believing in this very good thing all the way to the end.
Notes
I hope you’ve enjoyed this interlude from my usual 3000 to 4000-word essays about literature or history. I will probably continue to keep things short over the coming months. Life is even busier than usual. I have a couple of articles in the works, which will hopefully see the light of day by September, and I am also slowing toiling away on a book proposal. Meanwhile, the Oilers are keeping the evenings lively.
A few more notes about Connor McDavid from the Associated Press. “McDavid has 42 points so far in these playoffs. The only players with more: Wayne Gretzky with 47 in 1985, Mario Lemieux with 44 in 1991 and Gretzky again with 43 in 1988.”
Here are the few resources I made use of for today’s tribute to the Stanley Cup:
“Edmonton ready to welcome hockey phenom Connor McDavid,” Global News, June 25, 2015
https://globalnews.ca/news/2075440/edmonton-ready-to-welcome-hockey-phenom-connor-mcdavid/
Stanley Cup Journal (history of Stanley Cup)
https://www.hhof.com/StanleyCupJournal/exSCJ_08.shtml
A Fan’s Notes, The Paris Review (Chomsky)
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2016/08/05/a-fans-notes/
“Connor McDavid, by the numbers, and the historical significance of his 2024 playoff run.” Associated Press
https://apnews.com/article/stanley-cup-2024-oilers-panthers-mcdavid-4cee51fcce8b05fda8fe0906f8141ff0
Let's go Oilers! (he shouted without irony)
I am very caught up in the Oiler's amazing play-off run and can't wait for tonight's game, wanting desperately for this team to overcome the odds and complete the come-back, it is such a compelling narrative, and this Panthers team play the perfect foil, but...
But in the back of my mind, even as I envy the sense of community, camaraderie and coming-together in Edmonton, I can't help but shake the thought that it can all turn so dark, so quickly. We all know that a hypothetical loss tonight could turn the cheerful, hugging, back-slapping, high-fiving, chanting crowd into a destructive and violent mob in the span of a beer chug.
If a McMansion is a cheap ersatz of an actual Mansion, then I'm afraid as great an athlete as young Connor is, he is no saviour. We can enjoy this historical performance and get caught up in the hype, the atmosphere, the festivities, but our ultimate hope, our worth, our love of neighbour and even our joy cannot depend on the outcome of a Game 7 Stanley Cup Final.