Hello. Welcome to my blog. If you are reading this, you are most likely a friend of mine, a family member, an acquaintance, or someone who somehow managed to stumble upon this by complete happenstance. I registered this blog site about a month ago in order to have somewhere to publish random musings that I think about on a daily basis and would have no other way of communicating, but I wanted the first post to be something meaningful to my personal life. As you can tell from the title of this post, I have finally made the decision to explain my love for the Detroit Red Wings despite the fact that I have lived my entire life in the northwest suburbs of Chicago. This is a question I am asked on a weekly, or sometimes even daily basis, and I hope this blog can finally clarify it once and for all.
This all goes back to when I was very young back in the early 1990s. As far back as I can remember, I have been infatuated with the sport of hockey. I've played hockey ever since I began learning how to ice skate at the age of 6, and played competitively up through my senior year of high school. Hockey has been my first and most prominent love for as long as I've been alive. In 1992 the Chicago Blackhawks advanced all the way to the Stanley Cup Finals against the Pittsburgh Penguins and through photos I have seen since then I was sitting on my father's lap, fixated our television enjoying the skill, physicality, and beauty of hockey. I guess you could say that the formative years of my life were dominated by watching the Blackhawks playing the game that was my first true passion, It was during those years that I developed my overall love for the game and would try to consume any hockey broadcast that was available through broadcast/cable television.
In 1996 the Detroit Red Wings had the most successful regular season in NHL history, posting 62 wins in an 82 game season. They accomplished this feat with players such as Steve Yzerman, Igor Larionov, Sergei Fedorov, Paul Coffey, Nicklas Lidstrom, as well as many others while being heavily featured on national television on almost a weekly basis. This was the season where my love of the Red Wings was cemented. They showed me how beautiful the game of hockey could be when played at it's highest possible level. Though they lost in the conference finals to the eventual Stanley Cup champion Colorado Avalanche, I knew this was the team for me with the way they played the game, combining dazzling skill with tight checking and grit that enabled them to win pretty much any type of game. The next two seasons they won the Stanley Cup with a combined record of 8-0 in the Finals against Philadelphia & Washington. They ultimately would win 3 Stanley Cups in 6 years, losing 1 game combined in the 3 Final series wins, and picked up another Stanley Cup in 2008 against Pittsburgh.
Fast forward to the current day, and my love of the Detroit Red Wings has never wavered even in the slightest bit. I have been lucky enough to never see the Wings miss the NHL playoffs during my lifetime. I try to plan my commitments/events around Red Wings games so that I hardly ever miss a minute of their games. They still continue to astound me with mind-blowing amounts of skill from players such as Pavel Datsyuk, Henrik Zetterberg, Gustav Nyquist, Tomas Tatar, and Niklas Kronwall. Sure they sometimes drive me crazy with mistakes and losses that seem to be possibly/completely avoidable, but that's what sports (especially hockey) do to you. It's a constant love/hate relationship, and it's part of the reason why I keep coming back for more. I love the Detroit Red Wings, and unlike other relationships I have had in the past (and/or future), this is one relationship that will never end until the day I die.
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