Celebrating the Moment

The Masters and its annual Salmon-to-Capistrano vernal heralding rightfully headlines sports news this week. The NCAA Basketball tournament just capped off another frantic March with a thrilling title game. The NBA's regular season draws to a close with a historically tight Western Conference race, and any number of terrific story lines. Baseball's long season has begun to slowly unfold. Mel Kiper's taken a shower and shed his bathrobe in preparation for his annual moment in the sun.

As usual, we continue to overlook the most consistently exciting moment in sports. Alex Kovalev got his barbaric yawp last night, his slapshot ripping the net behind Tim Thomas' shoulder to give the Montreal Canadiens a 3-2 overtime win over the Boston Bruins. Kovalev's arms shot in the air, making the universal sign of victory as he spun back towards his onrushing teammates.

And overtime playoff hockey delivered as it always does.

I'm no longer the hockey fan I once was, rarely catching a full regular season game even on television. Too many things competing for my time, I suppose. But even as the my interest in the game has waned, I'm a sucker for playoff overtimes. The teams don't matter, for the most part, because the purity and intensity of the moment elevate the spectacle beyond partisanship (and because the Bruins, my putative favorites, have stunk on ice for years). No other athletic competition offers the instant-by-instant potential for resolution, the razor's edge difference between victory and defeat. The speed of the game plays immensely into the equation, the end-to-end action riveting and the finality of the result brutally human, good and bad meted out equally and only sometimes fairly.

I remember watching with my father as the Islanders' Pat LaFontaine beat the Capitals with a wrister from the slot in the 4th overtime of a 1987 playoff game. Neither of us had a rooting interest in the game, but we stayed up until 2:00 am on Easter morning because it was overtime playoff hockey. I saw Keith Primeau beat the Penguins in the 5th overtime 8 years ago, and I couldn't care less about the Flyers. I leapt off the couch when Uwe Krupp won the 1996 Stanley Cup for the Avalanche with a goal in the 3rd overtime of Game 4 against the Florida Panthers, and while I love me some Uwe Krupp, the result of that game didn't mean a thing to me.

But the payoff was so very cool.