12 Things I Liked In 2012

In no particular order:

Carey Price at the All Star Game.

P.K. Subban being a celebrity off the ice: from his appearance on Strombo to his fundraising efforts to his new job as a SportsNet analyst. All of it.

NHL players making their yearly holiday visit to children's hospitals despite having no obligation to do so.

Saturday Night Live knowing both when and how to be serious: the children's choir singing Silent Night in honour of the victims of the shooting in Connecticut, the adorable send-off for Kristen Wiig, and the simple memorial for the Beastie Boys' Adam Yauch after he died: just a clip from a past episode where they performed "Sure Shot," in which he calls out the hip-hop world on their disrespectful treatment of women.

The second season of Episodes, which could have been a disaster but was just as awkwardly funny as the first, and a welcome change from most other summer TV programming.

The time I met Jack McBrayer. (Not so much met, as saw him, walked past him, said "Hi welcome to Montreal I'm a huge fan" and he thanked me and walked away and I freaked out a little.)

The time I met Adam Baldwin. (I don't think I met any hockey players this year. Sadly.)

The fact that I got to see this Key & Peele sketch performed live, and now everyone knows how funny it is.

The Habs drafting Alex Galchenyuk, and then the 2012 NHL Draft ending promptly after that, and the Bruins didn't draft anyone. (For the sake of pageviews, I'll mention his name a few more times. Galchenyuk. Alex Galchenyuk, good Gally miss Molly.)

The opening scene of the Mindy Project's pilot episode. A bunch of people didn't like it, and then begrudgingly admitted in, like, DECEMBER that the show was getting better. Clearly they didn't see the same pilot I did. (Honourable mention to Ben & Kate, which did actually have an awful pilot episode, but won me over when I gave it a second chance.)

The AHL games at the Bell Centre that brought Ben Maxwell and J.T. Wyman back to town, and introduced me to my new silent enemy, Eddie Pasquale.

Knowing that I'd see hockey, even if there was a lockout, even if I was out of the country. Two of the first things I saw when I arrived in Italy in October: a guy wearing a Detroit Red Wings track suit, and a store whose windows were dressed with pictures of the Vancouver riot couple. I am not making this up. (One of the first things I heard was a Chuck Berry song on the loudspeakers at a train station. Italy is a weird and wonderful place.)

Oh, and a 13th for good luck: Basketball.

Wow, when I look at it this way, 2012 wasn't a complete bore. Then why am I so glad that this year finally moved its lazy ass out of my way?
Best wishes to all of my readers (all one of you) for a happy and, most importantly, healthy new year.

2011: All these things that I've done

Lately there's been a lot of pessimism among Habs fans, myself included. I'm usually as optimistic as I possibly can be about sports, so this is kind of strange and new to me. But 2011 wasn't the easiest year I've seen in my brief time so far as a sports fan. It started out well enough - I worked on my 2010 year-in-review post in sunny Florida. Unfortunately, vacations (like all things) come to an end, players get injured, games are lost, and sometimes the worst happens.

I'm trying not to think of 2011 as the year where [insert bad thing that happened]. So many other great things happened this year that I'll be happy to remember:

I went to my first-ever football game...
And my first-ever basketball game...
Where I got to be on the Jumbotron - which is every sports fan's dream, right?

Despite my lack of athletic prowess, this was the year that I tried to play a sport. (I was bad at it, but that's okay because I'm proud of myself for trying, and golf isn't really that great of a sport anyway.)

At one point this year, I owned T-shirts for teams in all 4 major North American sports teams. (And I probably still do, but one of them has gone missing.)
Maybe I should up that number to 5, now that soccer is increasing in popularity and the Impact are joining the MLS and have snazzy new uniforms.

This was the year I met Ken Dryden, Yvon Lambert, and Chris Nilan.
And Michel Lacroix.
And Hal Gill, sort of.
This was the year that Jonathan Toews looked at me.

This was the year that I went to my first playoff game - and while I sniffled and coughed through the whole thing, I booed the Bruins as much as my sore throat would allow.
This was also the year that I screamed so much at a hockey game that it gave me a sore throat.
This was the year I got to see Bell Centre celebrity Logan win "fan of the game."

This was the year that I got to be a bet commissioner on live radio. (But not a slap bet commissioner - the stakes were too high. I would have been responsible for Moe Khan getting slapped by a CFL player, and there's no way I'm mean enough to do that.)

This was the year that I started a Twitter hashtag that started trending, and became so popular that even famous people got in on the fun and newspapers wrote about it.

This was the year that I saw the Stanley Cup. And yeah, maybe I kissed it. But that was in April, when it belonged to the Blackhawks, so it's okay.
This was the year that I found out what it's like to be a Habs fan in Toronto. But that was in April, before the Leafs started getting their act together.

This was the year that the good guys won the Super Bowl and the NBA Championship.
This was the year that the Florida Panthers stopped being where NHL players go when they've been bad.
This was the year that Saku Koivu returned to Montreal as a hero.


Even though Mick Jagger had already told me, this was the year I learned that you can't always get what you want. But if you try sometimes, you just might find you get what you need.
Happy 2012, everyone.

Two years old!

I'm posting this a little late (as usual) but a couple of weeks ago, Hab It Her Way celebrated its second anniversary. Somehow, this little blog is two years old. How time has flown by.

To be honest, I'm a little freaked out that this little side project is half as old as the just-retired Four Habs Fans. (Good night, sweet princes. And LG77, whose arrival made Four Habs Fans even better than it was. I think I'll miss you most of all.)

Two years later and Czechtacular and I still have a soft spot for captain Saku Koivu. We're still flailing over Czechs and exclaiming at every brilliant save by a certain cowboy goalie.

But some things have changed. People have started reading the blog and asking our opinions on things. (Or, at least, pretending to.) I seem to know stuff about stuff. We've found ourselves a whole network of brilliant hockey girls who think like us and laugh with us. All the film nerds I know call me a big sports girl. (Because I'm big on sports, apparently.) They're all welcome changes - that is, until those same film nerds say "She loves hockey" in the same tone that I would say "She loves tofu," but always ask me if ever I have a spare ticket to a Habs game can they come?

Five years ago I would have never imagined being the blogger I am today: addicted to Twitter, watching loads of hockey, writing about it, owning two Habs jerseys, dating the epitome of a sports guy... But I enjoy all of this so much more, precisely because it was so unexpected. I'm happy that two of those years have been spent writing.

Thanks for reading! I hope the Canadiens have a great season so I'll have lots to write about.

Flawed logic

Okay, so 2011 Florida Panthers draft pick Rocco Grimaldi has been getting attention because he's Christian. He said some things on Twitter that were maybe a little too extreme. Personally I like hearing people express themselves but will roll my eyes any time someone goes on an overly long Twitter rant, simply because the medium was built for 140-character bursts.

Sure, Grimaldi's views on what he sees as the oversexualization of society are a little too "out there" to go ignored on such a public forum. I don't expect everyone to agree with his views completely (and I'm not saying that I do), but I completely respect his will to express them. As a practicing Catholic, I know that sometimes it's hard to live your faith life at the same time as your regular life. (Or, as one of my friends said so misguidedly, I'm "Catholic but still cool," which is basically like telling an overweight girl that she's pretty even though she's fat.) Maybe Grimaldi needs to learn to express himself in a different way, so that the majority of his audience won't feel like he's being too critical of them. After all, he wants to evangelize and inspire, and he can do that just as well by being positive and promoting God's love rather than making others feel like they're doing something wrong.

That's basically what this is about, isn't it? Grimaldi talked about what he thinks others are doing wrong (or so it appears), and a lot of people didn't like it. Which is perfectly okay, but many responses to this basically implied that he's the one who's wrong. The only one who's wrong. That's not going to solve anything.

Recent events involving Wayne Simmonds have taught us that the NHL and its fans haven't completely grasped the concept of tolerance. We've been saying for ages that there's no such thing as being "too small" or "too black" or "too gay" for hockey, and I can't wait until the day that all of those statements are true. How about we add "too religious" to that list? It shouldn't be considered taboo either.

There are strides to be made before we see the NHL we want to see. It'll take time, and a lot of baby steps, but by starting to engage in the right kind of discourse, we'll get there.

Let's Get Started

Tickets for Canadiens home games went on sale today, thus continuing Montreal's tradition of keeping fans indoors on what might be the last warm Saturday of the year.

I don't know why I do it: sitting in a "virtual waiting room" and paying ridiculous service charges and ever-increasing ticket prices, then waiting months until I actually go to the game I spent money on. And, of course, I don't care because just getting out of the virtual waiting room feels like winning the lottery. But it's been months since I've seen any hockey, live or on TV, so I don't care.

As a hockey fan, I'm excited to get over The Year That Hurt and end this emotionally painful offseason. I'm so excited to see my Habs that I won't even complain about how this season's promotional campaign is kind of creepy and has already been done by the NBA.

I love all my Habs, but I wouldn't want to chop them in half and sew them together. Not even to make Super-Habs.
Although... I could sell a script to the producers of Saw...

I can't be the only one who remembers these ads:


Outside of hockey, I've had a great summer and don't want the weather to start cooling down. I want hockey as a reward for braving the winds and the snow. Knowing that I won't have to watch people shuffle around in flip-flops like morons isn't satisfaction enough. (Seriously, though, what is about flip-flops that makes people forget how to walk like functional human beings?)

But this is it. It's time to stop thinking about playoff heartbreak and start wondering what new things I'll learn this season and what awesome sports things I'll get to see for the first time. It's time to put away the bad-luck Gorges T-shirt until next summer. It's time to think about face paint and pub fries. It's time to be irrational and clog up the DVR for the next seven months.

This is going to be awesome.