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skyrrhawk · 06-09-2024, 09:29 PM

birch street curve: a blog covering life in pro hockey, by celeste desjardins

“from now on, we are enemies”

So this title definitely makes this sound worse than it is. I mean, it’s really overdramatic. But there’s some truth to it.

We’re not going to be playing together again for a while, if ever. And that’s a lot to take in all at once. We’ve spent four years playing together and living basically in each other’s pockets at the arena, training and eating and sometimes power napping when we needed to. And that’s about to be gone, replaced by group chats and “Hey, let’s get dinner when I’m in town to play you” and “What do your schedules look like” and All-Star weekend get togethers.

Isn’t it weird?

There’s not a day that’s gone by in the last four years where I’ve been prepping to play hockey and not been around these guys. Our pregame routines have adapted to each other. And I don’t know how well I’m going to be able to adjust to anything different. Sure, over time, I’m sure it’ll work itself out. But I’m going to be walking into the locker room at Madison Square Garden and expecting to have people at my back who just aren’t going to be there because they’re halfway across the country languishing in whatever fresh hell the United Center is. I mean, do you know how hard it is to get used to spending a huge chunk of your time hanging out with someone ten inches taller than you on flat feet and who you have to communicate with through several series of increasingly complicated hand signals?

And it’s weird how long ago I started writing this, and then kind of just left it to rot while I played a bunch of international hockey with a big old C on my chest, and now that’s done, and I realize hey, it’s time for another blog post. After all, you’re coming up on a big milestone.

Leaving Quebec City was…. a slow trickle of teammates and friends packing up apartments and four years of a life into boxes and suitcases and leaving for the airport to get on planes and fan out across the continent. The group chat spans a number of time zones that is honestly really frustrating to think about, because it used to just be one. It’s a mess of screenshots of schedules and travel plans and itineraries and “Does this apartment look like shit?”

Which, apartment hunting is hard. Especially in New York City. I’m not really a flashy, give me the best place you’ve got kind of person. I’m from freaking Lewiston. We still have tenements in my hometown, all the remnants of the mills and what was left when they closed. But there’s space, which is definitely a luxury in Manhattan. So I put my stuff into storage and couchsurfed with my cousin for a couple of days while I looked at apartments. And I really, really looked. Midtown East. The Flatiron District and Rose Hill. Greenwich Village. Soho and the Bowery. Chelsea. But honestly, I want to live close to things and to work, so I ended up settling on this really nice two-level in Hell’s Kitchen. It’s not huge, but it’s got a kitchen, a bedroom, and in-unit laundry, so that’s pretty much all I need. Plus enough space to host gatherings, if I need to.

There was a lot of complaining happening in that group chat, believe me.

Other “before-joining-the-Rage” life developments include me going on a whole date, but that’s a story for a different day, and honestly, it’d be pretty weird to share that kind of information this early on. Maybe you’ll never hear about it again! We’ll just have to wait and see what happens and all that.

The writing of this particular post has taken me pretty much multiple weeks at this point. In all the chaos of winning the Cup, a second bronze at World Juniors, and moving from Quebec City to NYC, I just didn’t have enough time to sit down and add anything to it. And I know I keep reiterating that, but it’s the truth. I mean, I started it before I even left for Sweden, and now I’m finishing it after having played my first games up with the Rage. It’s not my SHL debut, but it’s getting close.

Preseason was weird. I’ve never been super quick to adjust to new teams and new linemates, but it went pretty alright. Though there’s definitely something a lot weirder to playing with folks you’ve been keenly aware of for a long time over people you’re only just meeting. It’s definitely been weird trying to tamp down the shock and awe at getting to play with someone like Aksel Fiske, who’s one of my own predecessors in Quebec City. The practice is good, though, for whenever I get the call for playing with Team USA, because that really might be hard to manage without my brain fanboy-leaking out my ears.

This entry feels wildly scattered compared to my past blog posts, and that’s because it really kind of is. I feel scattered. Like dandelion seeds on the wind after an elementary schooler pulls up the flower. Far away from the people that I’ve felt comfortable with and grown into an adult with.

I think you can probably tell that from my preseason stat line, to be honest. 2 points per game, 3 penalty minutes per game. A five and ten from fighting one of my best friends. For the sake of the integrity of the game and in the interest of not getting bullied on Instagram by a hockeyfights.com user, I will not be elaborating. But I will say I’ve got a pretty sweet black eye right now as a result. Don’t fight people bigger than you, kids, not when you have as little skill or experience at it as I do. I’m not out here trying to be a goon, you know? A little bit of a shithead, sure, but not a goon. I’m not built for that.

I will say I got about 300 gleeful texts from friends and cousins and one very distressed voicemail from my Memere, though. She was not happy with me.

I’m not trying to set my expectations too high. The Rage aren’t expected to do much this season. Or next. Or maybe even the season after that. There are other folks from my draft who are on better teams and are better poised to make an impact that I am on a team that a lot of people call a bottom feeder. You don’t make statements like that in isolation. We see and hear them. And I’m sure a lot of people throughout the various fanbases don’t really give a damn about that, because we’re not real to them, but it doesn’t change the actual facts of life.

But that said. Expectations. I’m trying to keep mine low and push to be the best I can be in support of my team. I want to live up to what they drafted me as, second overall coming off winning that Anrikkanen. I don’t want this organization to feel like they made the wrong decision by picking me instead of someone like Juan, GWG, Troy, or Peanut. I don’t want them to regret this.

And regret’s a really strong thing, isn’t it? I regret not pushing harder in my first year at World Juniors, because I felt resentful of being left off of a USA roster proper and getting stuck on a North America roster that was just there to fill a slot and not actually progress in the tournament. I regret the way I treated my friends during that tournament because of how bitter I was about something they had nothing to do with. And I regret not working on my defensive skills more as a kid, because I was so single-mindedly focused on the personal accolades that come with being a goalscorer when you’re playing Peewee.

So that’s something to work on.

This season is going to be hard. New York City’s a lot bigger of a place than I’ve ever lived, and I’m sure the travel schedule is going to be a lot different than what I got used to in the J. (If anybody has tips for how to manage living in Manhattan when you’re from somewhere much, much smaller, please let me know, because I will take all the help I can get!) I already feel homesick, for Lewiston and for Quebec. I haven’t figured out how much I can actually lean on my new teammates yet, and my old ones are as busy and as lost as I am.

(I’m not naming names, but certain other people who moved to a large American city once we finished in Quebec are very slow to reply to texts sometimes.)

I don’t think I’ve actually said anything of worth in this blog post, but that’s not really the point of them. We’ll wait and see how this season goes. And it’ll be something to look back on a few years or maybe decades from now, to see how I felt going into my rookie season in the SHL. And I think it’s normal to feel this scrambled when you’re on the edge of the rest of your life, on the brink of finally making it after all the years of work and the hard decisions and the praying to get lucky with the circumstances around you to even get a shot.

And it’s a thank you to the people in Quebec City and in Manhattan who saw something in me that they decided they could work with and that they wanted on their team. And a thank you to those dear friends of mine who finally beat it into my head that I need to play at least a little tiny bit of defense and not just hang out waiting for somebody to feed me the puck for a breakaway.

(Hey, I’m trying to be a little more self aware these days!)

And this is a shitty way to end it, but I’ve never really been good at endings. And this entry’s shorter than the last one was, which feels like a let down, but I have been busy as hell and I think everybody understands that. So I’ll just leave it here until next time. So long and thanks for all the fish, as it were.

[1760 words]

***Seany148*** · 06-09-2024, 09:54 PM

hold on you can't just mention a date story and dip like that

can't wait (actually I can wait) to see you score on Ramen

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