Dallas Stars: Savor The Intense Emotion Of Late-Season Push
By Tom Dorsa
The Dallas Stars are bringing out a lot of emotion from us. Savor the moment and feel all you can feel from this.
There’s no sugarcoating it: There are many valid reasons for disbelief if you’re a Dallas Stars fan, and this most recent stretch of games cements those feelings. Dallas has lost four out of their last five and cannot pull things together without starting goalie Ben Bishop.
But it isn’t just injuries, we’re being manhandled by teams playing on the second half of back-to-backs. We have been outclassed by Casey DeSmith, Curtis McEhlinney, and Antti Niemi. It’s hard to stay optimistic as our postseason chances see the most doubt they have since November.
But we don’t exactly need optimism. We feel enough from these silly hockey games to be good on emotional outflow for months.
Sports are an art form, first and foremost. You’re supposed to feel something as you relate to the players and coaches on the bench, and wear the same colors as a team playing hundreds or thousands of miles away.
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Firstly, if you’re a long-term Stars fan, keep in mind that our club is playing meaningful hockey in March and likely in April as well. This is better than supporting a bankrupt team that misses the postseason five years in a row.
To watch a hockey game on the edge of your seat, be it a couch or a cushion in American Airlines Center, is a plus. Sports are supposed to excite you, exhaust you, elate you, deflate you. Being able to experience a Stars postseason push is something we missed out on last season – why not cherish every last tear, scream, swear word, or goosebump we emit?
We’re being entertained by people fighting and clawing for a vulcanized rubber sphere with microscopic white ice chips around the edges. Like a well-written film, these people want us to be as enthralled and fascinated with their stories – the individual and collaborated tales of athletes and players always looking for more.
To fully absorb and appreciate these stories, the art form of sports as previously mentioned, we have to embrace the emotion of the game.
Dallas Stars vs Toronto Maple Leafs was a trip and a half. Dallas fell behind 2-0 early, came from behind to score four unanswered goals, then allowed two to James Van Reimsdyk (now public enemy number one). It looked like the home team took all the momentum, until Brett Ritchie’s go-ahead goal in the third.
Dallas Stars
We were wrong. Toronto scored again with the extra attacker, then after a scoreless overtime, the Leafs won in a shootout thanks to goals by Tyler Bozak and Mitch Marner. Just take a step back and reevaluate how that game made you feel.
It’s like a really bad line chart. From frustrated, to ecstatic, to concerned, to relieved, to angered, to devastated, in just over three hours.
The gutted feeling we as Dallas Stars fans got at the end of our sixth loss out of seven games was horrid. But, feeling something is better than feeling nothing, and there are few things that stimulate intense emotions like sporting events.
It’s going to be a long, bumpy ride for the remainder of the 2017-18 season, but it will not be anything less than emotional.
In life, in sports, and in hockey especially, emotion is everything we strive for, so let’s buckle up and take solace in the fact that these games are so emotionally enticing.
Next: Dallas Stars Still In the Thick of Playoff Race
We play this trick on ourselves that unless we win games, win our division, or even win the Stanley Cup, we have failed as a sports franchise and sports city. When you take a step back and savor the beautiful emotion that comes with hockey, that perspective can change.