Today, you get a second post.

A co-worker asked me today why it seems that hockey fans tend to be an exclusive lot who remain fairly indifferent to other sports. I had to actually think about it for a minute--and I am completely unaccustomed to thinking much in my line of work. My first impulse was to tell him that it wasn't true because I myself am a football and soccer fan. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought he might be right. Bottom line is that I am a hockey fan first and foremost. I enjoy other sports, but not nearly as much as I do hockey.

The proof in my situation is that I will watch anyone play hockey: college; NHL; AHL; any international games, etc. I won't watch just anyone play NFL football. For me, it's the Giants or it is essentially an off-week. Sure, I keep an eye on the playoffs and the Super Bowl, but I wouldn't reschedule my life to make sure I see a football game. If the Giants are out of the playoffs, I might peek here or there but there's no way I would drop some obligation or appointment to watch the 49ers play the St. Louis Rams. Hell, I haven't even watched a Monday night or Sunday night game the Giants weren't playing in since I was in college. And that was before Al Gore invented the internet!

So what is it about the game of hockey that makes it so singular and encompassing? Why does the sport illicit such staunch support? I mean, seriously--they cancelled an entire season! There was no Stanley Cup winner! There were no games played (outside of the boardroom) for an entire season and yet we all came back. Talk of the impending lockout (and Jeremy Roenick being on ESPN) ruined the joy that should have been the 2004 World Cup. Baseball lost me after the strike of 1994. I haven't been back since. Why did I so eagerly come running back? Why did we all come running back?

The answer can only be that hockey fosters a love that should not be questioned. It should be embraced. If you see a game live and in person, you're hooked. If you play it at any level, you're in. And once you discover the nuances of the game and the correct way to head-man the puck, it's over. You're in for life.

Look, I know that I am taking a risk the size of Bob Costas' ego by stating that; but again, it is so obvious. I also know that I could incur my own wrath because any time you wax poetic or nostalgic about a sport you always end up sounding like a pompous, odious and self-serving windbag like George Will or the midget Costas. And no one wants to be as repugnant as any of those guys--let alone be able to use a word like "odious" correctly in a sentence or in casual conversation--but for me, it is entirely true.

Now, the question that begs to be asked is what did I actually say to my co-worker after he asked me that question.

Well, here's the big reveal: I told him I didn't know. I also said that he was 100% correct in his assumption. Hockey fans--true hockey fans--can and are an exclusionary bunch. It's because all of us have been granted membership in a pretty exclusive club. The casual sports fan doesn't understand the allure of the game because they have not tried to understand it. To them, hockey is just a bunch of (mostly) Canadians skating around knocking the holy hell out of each other. To the average person, it's all about the fights and the goals because fighting is primal and scoring is what needs to be done to win. The regular fan doesn't know how to understand the proper defensive posture or how the goalies need to practice for years to fully embrace the art of correctly cutting down the angles. They don't get the underlying importance of communication on the ice and how all of the payers might speak different languages but that they all are fluent in the unspoken language of hockey. To me, that's the key to whole argument: we all speak and understand hockey. The language of hockey does not lend itself to easy-answer television. Baseball and football lend themselves to TV easily. I mean, it isn't hard to break down the whole "hitter vs. pitcher" relationship and in football, you have huge crashes all the time that speak to the primal and gambling populaces in a way that is easy to understand. Hockey is both a simple and a complicated game at the same time. None of that makes it through on TV the way it does when watching a game live at the rink.

So, yeah, I told him he was right and that I couldn't explain it. Not sure he'd have sat through the explanation anyway.