The bracket banner outside the Verizon Center. (Photo by me.)
When I was thirteen, I read Peter King and Rick Telander’s coverage of Super Bowl XXIX for Sports Illustrated and decided right then and there that I wanted to be a sportswriter. I wanted to be there to watch someone reach a pinnacle in their sport and then encapsulate the entire emotional experience for those who couldn’t be there in words. I can not pin point a single paragraph or passage of the lead article by Telander that inspired me the most, because there are just too many – from the passage about Jerry Rice, to Eddie DeBartalo and Carmen Policy trying to fathom ways their team could actually lose, to the end passage about Steve Young being so emotionally and physically spent that paramedics had to be sent to his hotel room (which also mentioned his girlfriend of the moment, which slowly broke teenaged crushed me’s heart). At that moment, I knew one of my life goals was to watch an championship sporting event – be it a Super Bowl, winning game of a World Series or Stanley Cup, or even a Calder Cup. I wanted to be there, and I wanted to write about it.
Fast forward fourteen years, to April 11, 2009 in Washington, D.C. In the most unlikely of sports to 13 year old me, college hockey, I finally saw a championship in person. And a week and a half removed from said event, I am finding that encapsulating that moment of victory into words is the most difficult thing I have ever had to write.
You see, there are no words that I can find that describe what it was like to be in the arena when Boston University won the National Championship in overtime. And there is no single story that encapsulates the spirit of the event. And yes, I have stories upon stories upon stories that I could tell surrounding the game and during it – of the pre-game gathering with hundreds of BU fans young and old who had traveled from literally around the world, to when I paced the concourse with mothers when they went down 3-1 in the third, to the priceless interactions between players and their families at the post-game gathering – but I don’t know if they would ever do justice to seeing a team win a championship, a pinnacle in their particular sport.
I have struggled for days about what to write about the Frozen Four, the trip, the games and the overall experience, and the only conclusions I have come to, after about fifty drafts, have been 1) it was the single best thing I have ever done in my twenty-seven years and 2) how difficult it had to have been for the Telander to write that piece in 1995, to envelope what the 49ers Super Bowl XXIX win meant to them and those players, Young in particular, because that piece made me feel like I was there, and there are no words that I can find that describe that well what it is like to be there for something of that magnitude.
It was just about the neatest thing ever.
The celebration after BU won the National Championship in OT. (Photo by me.)
So for those of you wondering where I have been the last few days, I have been finalizing my plans to travel to Washington D.C. this upcoming Thursday for the NCAA Men’s Hockey Frozen Four. Boston University clinched a space in the “Big Dance” by defeating the University of New Hampshire last Sunday in a game that definitely counted as a heart attack stress test.