We Couldn't Trust the Guy That Didn't Like a Single Sport

On August 16th, 2020, I bought a Fathead cardboard cutout of Damian Lillard’s face. 

Damian Lillard, at the time and for a long time, played for the Portland Trail Blazers. I’m not a fan of Portland, obviously, but this year I will celebrate my 5th anniversary with my Fathead of Damian Lillard. He’s been with me through four apartments, three break ups, two cities, countless late nights and the real Damian Lillard’s trade to the Milwaukee Bucks! At this point, I’m as attached to that thing as I am to my favorite childhood stuffed animal. I wake up everyday and I see Damian Lillard. 

To be frank with you, I don’t really remember making the purchase. I think I was just unhappy, living in a nearly windowless apartment in Philly and needed a pick me up– it was Dame Time. 

For most of my life, I’ve watched sports in two ways. One, through family osmosis. My family is made up of Cubs fans and Bears fans so I’m a Cubs fan and a Bears fan. Two, as an implicit part of dating the men I choose to date. To paraphrase Los Campesinos!, you can’t trust a guy who doesn’t like a single sport, so I sat through conversations about Messi vs. Ronaldo in high school and The Rose Bowl in college and the Bulls, the Sixers and the NBA bubble ever since. Like with the music they love, the sports and athletes the people you love are invested in become a part of your landscape. I think it’s a beautiful thing, really. 

Even during sports I find harder to engage with– baseball on TV, football anywhere– it’s never so bad because I've always liked engaging with sports on a narrative level and as a point of connection with people around me. I'm a good friend. I'll root for your team. (There's a photo of me out there wearing a New Jersey Devils sweater!) Really, I can have fun watching just about any sport if I'm with people who are invested in it and I can find an in somehow— usually an individual player.

That said, I've always struggled to connect with sports on the emotional level. I'm not a real competitive person by nature. I don't like playing games that much. I find it hard to get invested on that level. I'll cry when a stadium I'm sitting in celebrates the retirement of a longtime equipment manager, I struggle to care about the team that person worked for losing.

Until 2024, at my big age of 26, when I decided to get into hockey. It was just about a year ago now and, despite what I thought when I wrote about it, I have stuck with it.

When the Carolina Hurricanes lost game 3 of the second round of the playoffs to the New York Rangers, I felt something break inside me. They blew a 2-0 lead in a way that hurt me so bad. It felt like my heart shattered. I knew in that moment, they would lose the series. Game 6 was, on the surface, more heartbreaking. They blew a bigger lead. There were more goals scored. There was more at stake.

But Game 3... Game 3 hurt me in ways I've never been hurt before. I didn't know I could feel that way. I had a certified meltdown over it. In some ways, it's beautiful to have a game conjure up that feeling. I felt I unlocked something primal. Something deep inside. Suddenly, I understood my dad better. I understood every man I've ever dated better. It felt embarrassing and horrible and just.. Heartbroken. Inconsolable. Devastated.

This was new for me. It was a new feeling only comparable to when I heard my roommate listening to Joanna Newsom early in COVID lockdowns and experienced true anger for the very first time. It was a new feeling that made me empathize with toddlers just a little bit more. I didn’t know how to cope. 

Ever since then I’ve only gotten more invested in the Hurricanes and, to a slightly lesser degree, the Avalanche. I chose to get into hockey because it was the only sport that I could engage with on my own terms without input from anybody else. I have some friends who are into it, but it’s not like basketball or football where I’m getting a team pushed onto me directly. I chose to not be a fan of Chicago’s NHL team for a lot of reasons– I think it’s weird to use indigenous people as a logo like that, the sexual abuse scandal is the only thing I’d heard about them since they won the Stanley Cup when I was in high school a few times, they suck in a way that isn’t fun and I wasn’t born into a hockey family the way I was born into Chicago baseball and football fans so it’s tough to want to get into a team when they suck in a way that, I reiterate, is not fun at all – but the biggest one has more to do with logistics than anything. I cannot watch Blackhawks games without spending $30 extra a month or getting an expensive cable package (or wasting a bunch of my time on finding illegal streams.) I can watch almost all Canes and Avs games with the Hulu subscription I already pay for because they’re out of market. It’s just easier.

As much as hockey is fun inherently, the biggest thing for me actually getting into a new sport was how easy the product was to access. I had fun doing a jokey blog post about picking a new team based on who charmed me the most at All Star Weekend, but if I wasn’t able to watch the games easily then I probably wouldn’t have actually stuck with it long enough to get invested. It was part of why I never really got deeper into basketball. (I guess I could have enjoyed the Portland Trail Blazers as an out of market fan, but I spent a lot of time dating people who were frustrated fans of teams subjected to blackouts so I didn't realize that was an option.)

It’s been fun to be invested on the level I am. Being a music fan sort of became work for me at some point – both literally in the sense that I have made money from music writing and in the sense that when I talk about it online people treat me with the You’re-An-Account-Not-A-Person level of harshness that is leveled at much more professional people. I can tweet about hockey to no response. Silence. Maybe 2 likes. A bit more on Bluesky. It’s beautiful. It made me like posting again and now I follow a lot of brilliant queer and female hockey writers and fans so my online experience is dominated by the sport. 

After years of music fandom, it’s interesting to see the way online hockey fandom exists. I try to stay away from angry dudes who seem to always behave like they're on the wrong end of a parlay and scream at team account admin for daring to post about marketing events when the team hasn't been good. I'm seeing the girls mainly. Sometimes it gets a bit weird and parasocial, but I think it's mostly harmless. It’s actually beautiful how young women will always fall into the same patterns of fandom. The narratives and dynamics between players are just like band members or actors on a tv show. It’s all the same and that’s beautiful. Feels like being on Tumblr when I was a teenager except sometimes the angriest, meanest men in the world are in the replies insisting they don’t actually like the sport.

I feel for the writers I really like who suffer relentless horrible messages because they're presenting sports writing and discussion from their perspective. Particularly right now after the Panthers went to the White House to meet Trump, it’s been tough to watch the abuse that came to people criticizing the team’s choice to do that. It’s tough to see the responses that come to anything to do with pride nights. Music writers can get quite a lot of abuse, but brazen homophobia, racism and misogyny are all so expected in hockey spaces in a way that is genuinely jarring to witness coming from my neck of the internet writer woods.

In both spaces, it‘s so easy to see how much resentment so many people have toward writers (or even just people getting any attention online!) for this perceived authority that isn't real. These are people who probably don’t make that much money writing about the thing they enjoy and post about it for nothing, but they’re treated like their opinions are being forced on everyone. It’s a shame. It’s discouraging.

It really sucks to see because enjoying hockey through their lens has taken sports from something that was inextricable from the men that have been in my life to something my own and something that reminds me of passion and cultural analysis and what's so great about collective experience. It delivers me from the evil that is Paul Bissonnette. That alone is worth its weight in gold, but as I’ve thrown myself into making a really long zine full of music writing that– as much as I’m proud of it– makes me feel like I’m drowning, it’s just nice to like something without any expectation.

Did you hear that Mikko Rantanen is a Carolina Hurricane?

Some great articles I've enjoyed reading from the fine folks at Offside News:

Fun subtitled interviews (Russian and Finnish) translated by people I‘ve really enjoyed following on twitter:

Miranda Reinert is a music adjacent writer, zine maker, podcaster and law school drop out based in Chicago. Check out PDFs of most of my zines at the link on the top of the screen. Follow me on Twitter or Instagram or Bluesky for more reminiscing on the year: @mirandareinert.  This blog does have a paid option and I would so appreciate any money you would be willing to throw me! You may also send me small bits of money at @miranda-reinert on venmo/on Paypal if you want. As always, thanks for reading!

If you noticed part of this blog post was taken from a previous one, no you didn't.