There's something exhilarating about discovering a new sport. Right now I'm learning about the game of hockey, and I see it as a sort of journey that will hopefully end with me understanding and appreciating it like I never did before. With baseball season over, few NBA games I'm interested in being televised and the NFL having been reduced to something I casually check the scores for, it's the most exciting thing happening in my life as a sports fan. I don't fully love the game of hockey yet, but I think I'm on my way.

It's hard for me to connect to any sport without a sense of its history, so right now I'm in the process of learning the history of the NHL. In the past I'd looked up old rosters and Stanley Cup Final results, but that obviously still left plenty of gaps in my knowledge. I'm now looking up full playoff results in order to get a sense of which teams were good when. I've learned about some of the rivalries, and I'm starting to get a sense of who the greatest players and coaches were. There are several expansions and franchise shifts I still need to commit to memory, but that'll likely come with time. Right now most of my knowledge doesn't go back farther than the 80's, but I'm working on it.

I've also learned a lot of the rules and terminology of the game. I now understand what a "power play" is, what the Plus/Minus stat signifies, what the "C" and "A" on the jerseys mean, and other details like that. Again, I still have several gaps in my knowledge, but little things make a difference in understanding the bigger picture.

I find it hard to enjoy a competition when I don't have a preference for who wins, so it was necessary for me to decide which teams I like and dislike. Because of my fierce loyalty to Chicago, my favorite team is the Blackhawks. They may have just lost two in a row, but I'm sticking with them. I've decided that I hate the Detroit Red Wings (due to their being the top dog in the Blackhawks' division), the Montr