Dear Diary: Why this professor is watching old hockey games

CBC Calgary wants to know how you are living these days. What are you doing differently? Have you learned, realized or observed anything? 

This is the third instalment of our series, Dear Diary: In a Time of COVID-19, written by Steve Winters. He's a professor at the University of Calgary. This submission has been edited for clarity and length.

My wife lost her job last week. Laid off, along with most of the other employees at her small marketing research firm.

The likelihood of me losing my job is still pretty slim, so we should be okay for money for now, although things will probably start getting pretty tight, pretty quick.

My wife, though. She needs to work. She loves to work. She'll go crazy without a job.

So she's poking around, trying to see if there's anything out there. She found an ad for a communications director for a firm that she's done some consulting for in the past. She's not really a communications specialist, but she knows them, and kind of has a sense of how they operate.

"Should I apply for it?" she asked me.

It made me think of something I saw on TV the other night. There's no sports anywhere in the world these days, so every now and then the sports channels are showing classic games from the old days. A little while ago, I found Game 1 of the 1987 Stanley Cup finals: the Philadelphia Flyers against the Edmonton Oilers, back in Wayne Gretzky's prime.

That game was first broadcast when I was just 13-years-old, and it all seemed vaguely familiar. The Oilers not only had Wayne Gretzky on their team, but Mark Messier, too. And Grant Fuhr. And Jari Kurri. And Glenn Anderson. And Marty McSorley and Paul Coffey. They were awesome.

It was fun to watch them all in action again, if only for a little while. At one point in the third period, Gretzky got loose on a breakaway, all by himself behind the Flyers' defencemen, heading for a one-on-one showdown with the goalie. It seemed like a magic moment in hockey history, drifting back to me through the frozen mists of time: the Great One at his finest, showing us all how it ought to be done. What would happen? How would he score?

Except … he didn't score. He got stonewalled by Ron Hextall. It wasn't really even all that close.

The Oilers went on to win that game, 4-2, and they would take the series, too, 4-3. But that little moment reminded me of Gretzky's famous quote: "You miss 100 per cent of the shots you don't take."

"Yeah," I said, returning back in my mind to my wife and her dilemma. "Go for it!"

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