Hey SCHers,

I know many posters here are either vets or connected to vets, so I wanted to spread the word about a program my office is affiliated with geared towards local national guard vets. The project is looking for local national guard vets to help soldiers coming back from deployment with reintegrating into civilian life. The project focuses on national guard members because the majority of recent vets in Illinois are or have been in the national guard. A program description is pasted in below. If you're interested or would like further information, email me at puppetcubed@gmail.com, and I'll put you in touch with people coordinating the project.

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Hey Everyone,

NOTE: CNS made a card, and I've linked to it below.  Makes this REALLY EASY to do!

I looks like we're going with the Minnesota Wild Foundation, as per the poll results.  I've gone back and forth about the Paypal thing a bunch of times, and ultimately decided against it (reasons posted in the comments).  So here's how I think we should do this instead. 

FIRST: Between today and this Friday, April 22 print out this card (or send your own) along with this donation form and write a quick note saying you're writing on behalf of Second City Hockey, and Thank You to the Wild for gifting us a spot in the playoffs (or something like that).  Fill in your credit card info or write a check, and send it to:

Minnesota Wild Foundation
317 Washington Street
St. Paul Minnesota.

To download: UserID = puppetmasterp and login = puppetcubed

SECOND: THEN email me (puppcubed at gmail dot com) and tell me how much you donated.  Or post it in the comments below.  I'll tally up a final count to let everyone here know how much we raised (and to send the MN Wild Fdn an estimate of how much they can expect to receive in total).

I'd like to get this done ASAP b/c it's already been a while since the last Wild home game.  Again, sorry to drag on this, wish I had been more active on it earlier this week. 

I'm personally, leaving the country Wednesday (4/20) and will have limited email access (and time) till the end of the month, so I won't be checking SCH much.  If you want to send me a message, EMAIL me -- and I'll try to get online long enough to let people know how much money we raise.

Response from the MN Wild Fdn Rep:

"There is no donation too small, we appreciate all amounts so we would gladly accept your donation. And I must say this is by far the best reason I have received from someone saying they wanted to donate!!"

~puppet

Seriously people, I'm not even watching the game.  Making Fanposts isn't hard, except for that whole "minimum word requirement" thing.  And since I need more "content" (i.e. words) to post this, i'll add this little poem, which I should have posted after the last Hawks-Red Wings game.

This is just to say

I have eaten
the the heart of the enemy
that was on
the ice

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
it was delicious
so sweet with vengeance
and so cold.

Go Bears. Go Bears. Go Bears. Go Bears. Go Bears. Go Bears. Go Bears. Go Bears. Go Bears. Go Bears. Go Bears. Go Bears. Go Bears. Go Bears. Go Bears. Go Bears. Go Bears. Go Bears. Go Bears. Go Bears. Go Bears. Go Bears. Go Bears. Go Bears. Go Bears. Go Bears. Go Bears. Go Bears. Go Bears. Go Bears. Go Bears. Go Bears. Go Bears. Go Bears. Go Bears. Go Bears. Go Bears. Go Bears. Go Bears. Go Bears. Go Bears. Go Bears.

I promised I'd do this at some point, as a follow up to the first Story Project (Why Did You become a Blackhawks Fan).  I started this fan post while I was traveling weeks ago - being stuck in a foreign airport on a long layover in the middle of the night has a way of making you want to go back through old GDTs.  I kept laughing and smiling like a fool while reading the OT Thread for SCF Game 6 – airport staff thought I was nuts!!!  What can say?  I’m a sucker for nostalgia. But never quite finished going through all the old threads from June till now.

So even as the 2010-2011 gets into gear today, I thought we’d all like to relive the high point of last season, and what it meant to the posters here.

Besides, it's not like any of you were going to get any work done today anyway.

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Well, now that this "Turco in-Niemi out" thing is a reality, we may have to get used to the idea of Turco as our starter the glare of our starting goalie's pads.  So weigh in here on what you think our new favorite Dallas transplant will be wearing this coming season. 

Oh, and I'm leaving an "Other" option on the poll.  BUT, if you choose this option, have the balls vagina unwavering courage to back up that choice with a creative new option, rather than using it as a spineless default for having no opinion (b/c if you have no opinion, why they hell are you voting anyway??)

We've discovered how everyone on SCH has some interesting stories to tell.  Verstig and I have mentioned in the threads lately that it'd be cool to compile some of the stories that have come out on the threads in the last few weeks, in order to have them all in one place.  The one where I go and compile all the stories of reactions to the cup win will happen later, when I have time to go back through those threads.   But I thought this would be a good story project to start with in the meantime. 

And to help make the thread easier to read if there get to be a lot of posts:

RULES:

1. Start with a semi-pithy one-line summation as your subject line.
2. Reply with comments to other stories (please do!!), BUT start your own story as a NEW comment, not as a reply to someone else's comment.
3. No calling other people's stories or experiences "stupid," or some equivalent thereof.
   
4. These could get long, so let's try to pare down where possible.  I will probably be the worst about following this rule.

Some Examples:

Germware: "It all started with a hat...."
Older brother & his friends were hockey fans (I think from watching Kevin Smith films), and when we went over to Florida on holiday (during the Lockout), my brother picked up jerseys for his friends. He liked the Caps’ jersey, so he bought it & became a Caps fan. We got free hats for buying the jerseys, & I decided I liked the Blackhawks’ hat, so I got it & didn’t think much about the team.

Then when I got back home, I started playing the NHL games, realised hockey was awesome, and decided to stick with the ’Hawks even though they were dire. I followed the ’Hawks online (and only through their own website) so I was under the impression Mark Bell & Kyle Calder were actually good. Then I found out they showed NHL games on TV here (sometimes), and I watched whenever I could. The more hockey I watched, the bigger a fan I became.

gmh: "When I first laid eyes on this team, it was little more than an assembly of rocks."   

(excerpted from the commemorative Stanley Cup edition of the Committed Indian)

I wasn't alive in '61 or '71, and I was barely conscious of hockey in '92. Until I landed in Chicago for college, the only ice I saw on a regular basis came ground up and brightly flavored in Slurpee cups every summer.  I didn't have years and years of Hawks-related misery and resentment accumulating interest in my memory bank; my hockey heart wasn't a festering wound. 

When I first laid eyes on this team, it was little more than an assembly of rocks.  I'd enlisted a group of friends to accompany me to my first ever hockey game, a boring-on-paper tilt with the Thrashers at the end of October.  Four Hawks novices walked up to the box office window at the United Center and got student tickets for $8 a head.  The arena was chilled and empty, like a graveyard.  Fitting, because it was a Halloween game, and organist Frank Pellico was in a head-to-toe Grim Reaper getup.  Unfortunately, his furious rendition of Flight of the Bumblebees was the most animate thing about the pregame atmosphere, until the lights were dimmed and Jim Corneilson was introduced.

i'd heard about the anthem tradition on the radio, so I thought i was prepared.  How much noise could a ghost town produce, anyway? A hell of a lot, apparently.  I grew up listening to the spontaneous terrace hymns of European and South American soccer, but this was a much different sort of noise than an open stadium could produce -- it traveled downward, starting from the rafters, as if our cheers were being poured on to the ice from high up, and when the song ended, we could hear the echoes of our own voices.  That's how it was the first time, and every time after that, only these days it's less like a waterfall and more like an avalanche, burying everything underneath it with some primitive power that we can't name. 

I wish I could say that the hockey that night lived up to the novelty of being there for the first time, but the 3-1 loss was spiritless and anticlimactic.  Maybe it was the way the fans trudged out of the stadium that night, with sad eyes and quiet grumbles, that charmed me into returning the next week, and the week after that.  Maybe it was the lure of cheap seats, or the momentary bliss of the anthem, or the blood-red sweaters with the wry, knowing smile of the Indianhead, or the stubborn, alien beauty of the game.  Some part of me wanted to stick around, knowing no matter how dire the team was as a whole, they still had Toews, and they still had Kane, and so they still had hope.

Lastly, here's mine:

"I'm lucky my mother liked cricket more than Bollywood"

When my mother was young, she watched Bollywood movies b/c they were everywhere and that's what all the other young Indian women did.  But she liked watching cricket a whole lot more.  When my parents moved to the US in the late 70s, Bollywood movies were harder to come by outside video rental stores, but there was this strange game that was always on TV (especially on Chicago's north side, as we lived near Devon) called "baseball" that was kind of like cricket.  So my mom was perfectly happy watching as much baseball as she could, especially as the 80s progressed with likes of Ryne Sandburg and Andre Dawson playing for the Cubs.  As I grew up, my mom and I had our issues (b/c she couldn't accept the fact that I was a bit of a tomboy, ironically) but since my dad wasn't really a sports fan, watching sports was our mother-daughter bonding time where we wouldn't argue.  Now, we each have different levels of fandom depending on the sport:

• Basketball - my mom religiously watches.  Still not my game, but we watched the Bulls together throughout the early 90s, and I keep up with it only b/c the extended family is basketball-crazy.
• Football - I always was more of the football fan, especially with the 85 Bears season being my first real sports memory.  But lately, she watches more Bears games than me.
  
• Baseball - My mom watches every Cubs game, even through the abysmal 90s. I found it boring until high school when I finally learned to watch pitching.  We're both on equally levels of fandom now, though I'm a Sox fan b/c the Cubs fanbase (as a whole, not individuals!) kinda annoyed me.
  
• Everything else - I win the "bigger fan" title here.  She does watch the Olympics devotedly, but I probably know more about figure skating (since I used to skate), tennis, golf, speed skating, gymnastics, soccer, x-games, etc...

 So what does this have to do with hockey?

In the early 90s, the 10-year-old me heard of these really good players named Savard, Roenick, and Larmer - but was confused b/c they didn't play basketball, so my basketball-mad extended family knew nothing about them.  But there were always these rabid hockey-dads at the ice rink when I figure skated, so I assumed it must be a somewhat interesting sport.  This is when I saw my first hockey games on TV and realized how fast and fun the sport was.  I thought the fighting was stupid, but whatever.  It did take a back-burner to basketball at the time, but by the time I got to high school, I found hockey much more interesting.  Thanks to Dollar Bill, I spent that whole period watching the Devils, Stars, Red Wings, Avalanche, and even the Lightning in the playoffs.  And occasionally, I would go watch Daze or Kyle Calder play Hawks home games if I could find someone to go with (rarely).  I got to see greenhorn Keith and Seabs play, but by the time Toews and Kane were on the roster, I was living in another timezone.

These days, while I can't claim some long-standing hockey pedigree, I still think hockey the most fast-paced, heart-racing sport around.  And while it's the sport I've really gotten into the last, and probably know the least about, I'm thrilled to see the recent resurgence of hockey in Chicago. And this time, I'm the one who can take credit for turning my mother into a hockey watcher.

SO WHAT'S YOUR STORY?  OR YOUR FIRST HOCKEY MEMORY???