Chin up

I sat down Monday afternoon to write about the energy that's descended over the city these past months. I could call it something like "hockey fever," but that doesn't do it any kind of justice. It's a palpable thrum that transcended hockey around the end of the San Jose series.

As it turned out, Monday wasn't a great day to write about it. The city was quiet in anticipation, maybe trepidation, maybe just sadness that it would all be over Tuesday morning. But Colby sums up the feeling well:

I've cheered for Edmonton sports teams all my life, but when the 2005-06 playoffs began I was just somebody who lived here. By the time they ended, it was home. Of all our communitarian fictions--nations, tribes, geopolitical blocs, even families--cities may be the truest and most deserving of our suspended disbelief. But it has never been easy to feel Edmonton--a brute economic construct, unnatural in demographics and remorseless in its boreal interpersonal reserve. Cheering for the Oilers in Edmonton this spring was a little like being Pinocchio and awakening slowly to the unfamiliar throb of real veins and sag of flesh. It wasn't always comfortable: with real life, loss is part of the bargain. But even taking the ending into account, it is a matter for envy, not pity.

Jane Jacobs said "cities are, by definition, full of strangers." For the last two months there have been fewer and fewer strangers here. Even the guy in the orange wig and blue body paint seems like kin.

Sure, it's just hockey. But this sense of shared identity, shared destiny, of being somewhere good (this is, after all, a city only a politician could love)... well, it feels like it might be more than just a fleeting and superficial playoff high.