Fly High

In a world on fire, one takes what pleasures one can.

This week is the best week in professional sports, bar none – the first week of the NHL playoffs, when the intensity is high, the pressure is on, and the schedule is packed. Every day for the next week there will be games upon games, each one hard fought for and each one progressively more interesting.

Of course I can’t actually watch any of them, as the NHL in its perpetual quest for obscurity refuses to broadcast them on the same network that they use to broadcast their regular season and I will be dunked in a vat of mayonnaise before I pay for yet another subscription service, so I’ll read about it all in the morning, I suppose.

The fun part for me is that my hometown Philadelphia Flyers are back in the postseason for the first time since lockdown. Seriously, the last time they started a playoff game they were isolated in a bubble and all the games were played in empty arenas. It was one of the weirder parts of the pandemic, and they didn’t last too long before being eliminated.

They weren’t even supposed to be playing now. On March 18 the sports knobs gave them a 3.8% chance of making the playoffs, but they went on a tear and clinched a spot with a game to spare. This is why they now have that number stitched onto their warmup hoodies.

I like this year’s team. They’re scrappy. They play hard. They’re not the most talented group in the playoffs and I’ll be shocked if they win it all, but they’re fun to watch. They’re a tough out and nobody wants to play them and that’s all I ask. Plus they have the best mascot in sports.  Gritty rules.  Sports is a form of entertainment, after all – you get wrapped up in what is, in the grand scheme of things, a meaningless spectacle, you enjoy yourself for the time it happens, and when it’s over you go back to the world you left. There is value in that.

Once again they’re playing the Pittsburgh Penguins, a team that has won roughly seventy Stanley Cups and feels entitled to win the next few as well from what I can tell. I actually like the Penguins, having lived in Pittsburgh in the early 90s and watched them win it all when they were still underdogs and not the perennials that they are now. I just don’t like them as much as the Flyers.

It amuses me that the same sports knobs who gave the Flyers less than a 4% chance of getting to the playoffs at all were also predicting that they would be happy just to be there and they’d get swept by Pittsburgh without too much effort. It turns out that two games into the best of seven series the Flyers are up 2-0 and headed back to Philadelphia to see if they can end this on home ice.

They’re not going to, of course. I don’t see the Penguins getting swept either. But right now the Flyers are outplaying Pittsburgh by a wide margin, they’ve got momentum on their side, and they’ve served notice that they are not to be taken lightly.

Can the Flyers still lose? Of course. I’m from Philadelphia and pessimism is my birthright. I’m still trying to figure out how the Eagles can lose the 2018 Super Bowl. But for now I’m just going to enjoy what’s in front of me, cheer for a Flyer series win, and let the rest of the world do its thing without me for just a little while longer.

Go Flyers.