The fourth episode of HBO's ""24/7 Penguins/Capitals: Road to the NHL Winter Classic"" was bittersweet for hockey fans and anyone who loves great television.
Sweet in the sense that it was a brilliant piece of filmmaking, the best of the series and an episode that told the story not only of one game but of an entire sport. Bitter because it was the series' final installment, the last chance the hockey world will have —for an indefinite amount of time—to get unprecedented access to the game.
Those four episodes of ""24/7"" were a great promotional tool for hockey, the best since the introduction of the Winter Classic. To a lifelong hockey fanatic, the more casual sports fan or an HBO viewer who loves the channel's high-quality programming, ""24/7"" was a treasure. The show did a fantastic job explaining hockey without seeming condescending; bringing the uninitiated into a species of fandom that is incredibly difficult to enter while not offending the diehards. HBO let everyone appreciate and learn hockey from the inside, and in that sense gave the sport a fantastic platform with which to gain new fans.
The best way ""24/7"" did so was by showing how hockey fans —a group often thought to be completely different from those of other sports—fall in love with their game the same way other fans do.
In the series finale, ""24/7"" breaks from the NHL action to profile an outdoor pond skating rink near Washington, D.C. As the camera shows the innumerable young players on the ice, narrator Liev Schreiber says, ""It's the kind of place a kid learns how to play the sport, and then, how to be consumed by it.""
For many Americans, such a moment connected with their own memories of growing to love sports, hockey or otherwise, in their childhood.
Many students at this university grew up in the Great Lakes region, where they learned to play—and love —hockey on the countless frozen lakes and ponds the same way so many NHL players did. But for others who didn't have hockey growing up, it showed the way it creates the same kind of obsession and love they felt for another sport as children.
My upbringing in Berkeley, Calif., offered no opportunities to lace up the skates and play hockey for hours on the frozen rink a few blocks from my house. It barely gave me a chance to skate at all, with just one rink in the entire town (a rink that has been closed for years because it used 70-year-old refrigeration technology that leaked toxic levels of ammonia).
But what California did offer was a year-round baseball season, and the memories ""24/7"" explored on that outdoor rink were a lot like the ones my brother and I have of playing Wiffle Ball in our backyard. The same way a kid who grew up in Minnesota or Wisconsin can tell you all about what it was like to skate outside, I can talk for hours about our countless outdoor games and dizzyingly intricate set of rules.
It's no coincidence, then, that someone who grew up playing hockey outside would become enthralled with that game and I ended up obsessed with baseball. And although I don't follow that game as much as I used to (it's been replaced with hockey), I still have the ""love for the game"" about which so many sappy sports columns and books have been written.
The only reason I made that connection—between my endless Wiffle Ball games and the pond hockey contests kids in this region enjoyed—was because of ""24/7""'s brilliant ability to draw such a parallel. Seeing the love those players have for the game reminded me of the love I had for baseball. It's likely ""24/7"" did the same for countless other fans.
Maybe it will show someone who grew up playing football in the street or basketball in their driveway that the ties they have to those sports are the same as those hockey fans have. Maybe it will remind them of their games and the reasons they fell in love with their sports. Maybe ""24/7"" gave them a taste of that childlike enthusiasm for hockey. Maybe they'll watch hockey more, or go to a game, or teach their kids to play.
Clearly, HBO's fantastic filmmaking was a great thing for the NHL, and all sports fans should hope they return for another in-depth profile of hockey next year or sooner. Another season would offer hockey fans one more chance to nerd out and see the game from on the ice, but could also expose a new group of viewers to how great of a sport hockey is. And best of all, it could grow the sport's presence in places that hadn't thought about it before.
What did you think of ""24/7?"" E-mail Nico at nicosavidge@gmail.com.
