#was brewing for about a week but the athletic list hit some kind of nerve today

[himbeaux-on-ice]

i am. feeling a little sad about max. this week.

idk, just. to be one of those players who plays for the sheer overwhelming joyful love of the game, but is also intensely, extremely competitive, and to have been sidelined by flukey injuries three times last season and still kept pushing and coming back, because you've never let bad injury luck stop you before. and in the games you do play you are producing at the absolute best rate of your career, but you can't be in enough games and the team founders in part as a result of your absence, and even though you come back for the stretch and you keep scoring and scoring despite everything, it's not enough. the team misses the playoffs. you avow that you believe the squad you have can run it back next season healthy and do the big things that were expected, can come back and win. you ask for this chance at redemption. you do nothing but say you believe.

and your team, the team that made you re-discover your love of hockey after a miserable couple years and which you do nothing but sing the praises of the entire franchise and city, the team that you scored more goals for than anyone else while you were there, the team you wrote an entire essay about being so excited to become a part of, the team you call family, unceremoniously trades you away for less than nothing, as a salary dump because they were stupid, paying a team to take you by adding in a young defenceman too.

you pack up and move your family, your young kids who are deeply embedded in the local youth hockey community and your wife, out of the city you said you fell in love with, that you said fit so well, that you made your year-round home, and across the entire country. you don't come back for your friend's wedding (the kid who was traded with you does). you don't say goodbye to the fans. your agent says you saw it coming for a while, because of your contract, because of the cap mess, because this is what this team does (because they did it to his last client too). you say you're just looking forward now, not back, you're excited to take part in things with your new team and getting to know your new city. you say you're 100% healthy for the first time in a while. you say you're better off without everything about your old team that you said you loved so much just a few months ago, you say that all that stuff that was so good and kind of them made you weak actually. you say you're looking forward to skating with your new teammates. you go skating in your new jersey and borrowed gloves.

you immediately tear your acl and have to get surgery that will sideline you into the new year, six months, no skating. your old team suffers an injury that means they could have afforded to keep you anyway. they use the cap space to replace you with a guy who hasn't missed a game to injury since 2009. you are injured and sitting with your family in a new city thousands of miles away with months without hockey on the horizon. fans of your old team say they dodged a bullet, getting rid of your fragile self when they did. your old friend turns down money from the team that just threw you away to come and join you. the kid who you were traded to your second team in exchange for, who ended your last playoff run with a thud, takes up the captaincy that you once had, what feels like a lifetime ago - when you wore that letter for the first time you cried with pride, and then stood tall through three years of people saying you should be stripped of it for being too sensitive, too weak. 'i stood up there with a gun to my head every day and i took it. i'm proud of myself for doing so'.

the people who were your best friends in the world and your second family six months ago talk around your name in interviews, talk as if nothing major has been lost, as if you just vanished into thin air. everyone in the news talks about you in "maybes" and "ifs" and past-tense, when they remember to talk about you at all. the season is on the horizon and you still won't skate for months now. the athletic top 100 players list comes out and this year you've fallen right off of it. the nhl network top 50 comes out and you're not anywhere on it at all. you are 33 years old, 34 soon, battered and bruised and covered in scars and you've been through nearly unimaginable things and been written off and come back before. when they speak of you they say that maybe you're getting too old to keep pulling off the magic healing trick anymore, they say you're in the latter years of your career. the teammates who you came into the league with as young men are retiring, stepping back, waiting for contracts that might not come - they are getting old. fourteen seasons is such a long, long time.

you built your career up from absolutely nothing on the back of just sheer deep abiding love of the game, you accomplished so many genuinely impressive things (captain, olympian, 800 games, 600 points, 300 goals, lead your team in goals for half a decade, 40th most points by an american-born player ever and 22nd most goals), you came back from the unimaginable, you held up unimaginable weight upon your shoulders, you took torrents of abuse, you stayed kind through all of it, despite.

you still don't have a cup. you always get shown the door from these cities you fall in love with, always because of someone else's mistakes, always 'it's not you, it's me'. you've never been given a truly long-term contract, at least not one that pays you fair; you're nearly 34 now and that means that you never will. you have a happy family whom you dote on, you have a career you can already be so proud of. you still don't have a cup. you still don't have a cup.

the first time you ever stepped on the ice with skates on, you instantly fell down and cut your chin open. your mother, a mexican immigrant who had never skated in her life, took you home crying and thought you wouldn't ever want to do it again. the next day you asked to go back. she bought you a helmet with a face cage, and back to the ice you went anyway, despite.

the first time you ever played hockey, after signing up on a whim, you took a penalty on your very first shift and the ref had to help you to the penalty box because you didn't know how to skate. you fell down all over the place. it was embarrassing. you kept going back anyway. you kept going, kept learning, kept playing, until you got drafted as a first-round pick, despite.

when you were twenty-two years old, the largest player in the entire league put your head into an aluminum turnbuckle that braced up a pane of unforgiving hard-plate glass, the old-fashioned stuff, going full speed. when you hit it, it sounded like a gunshot. when you hit the ice, some people thought you might be dead. when they stretchered you off with a broken neck and a concussion, almost nobody thought that you would play hockey again. you sat at home rehabbing and watched the guy who hit you hoist the stanley cup. you returned to the ice six months after the hit and broke out for the best damn season of your career to that point, leading your team in scoring and only going up and up and up from there, despite.

this is what you do. this is who you are. you will take it on the chin, get up, wipe the blood off, and keep going, despite all doubters. you always get up. you always keep going, despite, despite, despite. even as it gets harder and harder to prove that to everyone, harder and harder to make your patchwork body get back up. to prove that you're not done yet. not yet.

the season that should be your fifteenth is starting without you. the hockey world moves on and forgets you. your spot is filled by younger, healthier, faster, cheaper, by committee, by anyone else but you. four more months, four more months. you play the waiting game and hope that there will be no setbacks, that when you get back to play you won't have to start this cycle all over again. you still don't have a contract past this season. four more months, four more months, four more months. fifteen years.

you still don't have a cup.