Vancouver fans deserve a Koala Hug.

In the playoffs, there's something about game days that isn't condusive to maintaining one's sanity.  The entire day is a big lead-up to the puck drop at 5pm.  Clocks slow down to a crawl, and tensions rise throughout the day.  Yesterday, after a seven day break, my Canucks had their first appearance in a Stanley Cup Final game since I was eight years old.  Needless to say, I was kinda jacked up for it.

The thing is, when you're eight years old, you don't spend the whole day fretting over where you're going to watch the game.  Things like the HDTV Proximity/Quantity Ratio and the Nacho Topping Density Scale don't factor into the mix at that age.  Plus, when you're eight, it's actually impossible to have 17 years of disappointment under your belt.  I was so blissfully ignorant... I just assumed that it was normal for the Canucks to be in the finals and that it happened every year.  I was mostly excited about the prospect of getting to eat dinner in front of the TV.  1994 was a much simpler time. 

But things are different now.  As a 25-year-old Canucks fan, I have been conditioned to worry about my team.  My brain is now a hypersensitive network of alarm bells just waiting to sound.  By the time I got to leave work at 4:30 yesterday, I was a walking bundle of frayed nerves.  By the end of the anthems, my eyes were bugging out of my head.  And by the time the similarly bug-eyed Raffi Torres put the game on ice with 19 seconds left, I was delirious. Not to mention several beers deep. 

The point I'm trying to make is that the playoffs don't just take their toll on the players.  Sure, we as fans may not know what it feels like to get caught between a Zdeno Chara and a hard place, but we've endured six weeks of mental and physical punishment ourselves at this point.  Day in and day out, we punish our livers, our stomachs, our vocal chords and our sleep schedules.  All for a little taste of that Stanley Cup Final feeling that we couldn't appreciate properly when we were eight.

Hockey fans of Vancouver, you're up 1-0 in the Stanley Cup Final, and you EARNED this Koala Hug:

There there, it's okay... just 3 more wins...