The puck dropped on a new NHL season this week. The Carolina Hurricanes raised their Stanley Cup banner in Raleigh on Tuesday night, then promptly lost 1-0 in overtime to the Florida Panthers. Not the start they wanted, but nobody’s taking that banner down. And for the first time in my life, I’m heading into an NHL season as a real hockey fan. With an 84-game schedule this year, the longest the league has played in over three decades, there’s plenty of hockey to watch.

DISCLAIMER: There will be talk of being a fan of multiple different teams in this post. I know this can be extremely triggering for many sports fans, and to be clear, I hear you. But that’s not what this is about, so sit back and enjoy the ride.

This isn’t a “the Canadians were right all along, let me convert you” article. It’s the story of a guy who grew up a complete outsider to the sport, and twenty years later caught a full-blown case of hockey fever. Some of it’s embarrassing, some of it involves my short attention span and sports media rights, and it ends somewhere I did not see coming.

Hockey is the only one of the major American sports I never played. Baseball, basketball and football for years, even two brief seasons of soccer as a kid. But hockey? Never played a second of it, never saw an ice rink. Hockey just wasn’t a thing in the agricultural heartland of Central California. I was even under the impression I was too big for hockey. Then I saw the Sharks’ 7th round pick this summer, Alexander Karmanov, a 7-foot-1 defenseman out of Chisinau, Moldova, the tallest player ever drafted in NHL history.

My first exposure came in high school. A buddy of mine and his family were diehard Sharks fans. These were the Sharks of my formative fandom years, hell on ice, at least in the regular season. I even had nicknames for a lot of the guys — Jonathan Cheechoo “Train,” Joe “every rose has its” Thornton, Patty “melt” Marleau, Brent Burns with his toothless grin was “Gummy Bear,” and Danny Boyle was “Boil on Your Ass” — every hit he threw got a “you got a Boyle on your ass!” out of me directed at the opposing team. The pace of play was exciting, but I was missing the action half the time and stuck enjoying the replays. I wasn’t fully getting it. Then there were the playoff exits. From 2004 to 2010, a great season ended in a humiliating playoff exit, year after year after year.

In 2005 I moved outside Raleigh and attended my first live NHL game. It kicked things up to a level I hadn’t fathomed. That 50-degree air pumped down onto you, thousands of people in jerseys, walking through the tunnel into the lower bowl and seeing it all laid out before you — the sheet of ice, the plexiglass, the big video screen hanging from the ceiling. Then the puck drops. The skates filleting the ice, the click when the blade catches a pass, the crash of the boards, the metallic ping of a slapshot off the crossbar radiating throughout the arena. Three periods of pure adrenaline. And those Carolina Hurricanes I saw that night? They turn out to be very important for how this whole thing comes together.

The 2005-06 Canes came right after the lost 04-05 lockout season. A 21-year-old Eric Staal, Captain Rod Brind’Amour, Cam Ward in goal (not the Titans QB). They won the Stanley Cup that year, beating the Oilers in seven. I was fast becoming a believer that hockey was the best live sports experience there is. But it didn’t translate to television in a way that would sustain me as a viewer.

The 2010s started with the Winter Olympics. I watched the Gold Medal game in a bar in California and seeing Sid the Kid and Canada beat the US was rough. A few years later I sat five rows up behind the glass for a Sharks shootout win in Denver, probably the best live hockey experience I’ve had.

In 2016 I was back visiting those same high school friends when the Sharks finally made the Stanley Cup Final. And they lost. Pittsburgh in six, Sidney Crosby ripping another championship away from a team I was backing. But I wasn’t even closely following the sport by then. I didn’t have cable or the out-of-market package. Hockey was this sport I didn’t fully comprehend, incredible in person, hard to find on television, and not that enjoyable when I did.

So in 2017 I took a trip to Boston and saw two Bruins games at TD Garden in one weekend, a Bruins bang-bang, to borrow Louis CK’s term. It convinced me I needed to become a true hockey fan, and I was going to smash my head against the wall until it happened. I went back to Colorado and signed up for NHL.TV. Bergeron, Marchand, Rask between the pipes, Chara’s hulking 6’9″ frame on the blue line, and up-and-comers Pastrnak and McAvoy. Everything was set up.

Then the blackouts began. Because the Bruins were a top team, an inordinate amount of their games were on cable. Unavailable. NHL Network games? Blacked out for NHL.TV subscribers, something MLB never does to MLB.TV customers. NBC games? No rabbit ears worked on the side of the mountain where I lived. The biggest games against the best competition were nearly all off the table. My first season with NHL.TV was my last.

In 2019 I had a modest futures bet on the Bruins, placed in person at the MGM Grand. They made the Final, forced a Game 7 in Boston, and lost. Then came the Covid bubble, and the NHL enforcing the strictest vaccine mandate of any league in North America. I checked out entirely, and missed one of my now-favorite players, Nikita Kucherov, winning back-to-back Cups. In 2023 the Bruins put up 135 points, a then-NHL record, took a 3-1 series lead on Florida in the first round, and lost in seven. The best regular season in league history was meaningless. My thoughts on hockey became, “This is stupid, the best teams don’t even win, you can’t even see the puck go into the net half the time.”

I didn’t watch another hockey game for three years. One Buffalo Sabres game in person after relocating to Western New York, which was great, but I wasn’t paying thirty bucks a month for MSG+.

Then came 2026. Team USA won Olympic gold, 16 years after the heartbreak against Canada. The Sabres made the playoffs for the first time in 14 years and it was the talk of Western New York. Tage Thompson, Team USA gold medalist and Arizona native who grew up in the same 110-degree heat I did, lives right here. The Sabres knocked out the Bruins, then pushed Montreal to Game 7 in the second round. The Canadiens, the greatest heel team in sports outside the Yankees. 24 Stanley Cups, the “olé” chants. I can’t stand them, but I absolutely respect them.

Then came the perfect storm. YouTube TV launched its long-awaited skinny sports bundle — 55 bucks a month to start, with out-of-market NHL games through ESPN Unlimited by the fall. (Yes, I hear you, Amazon, Peacock, Netflix and the rights fragmentation. I get it. But it’s a great value for a hockey fan.) For the first time in decades, sports fans were made a somewhat reasonable offer.

Meanwhile on X, I started seeing posts from a rambunctious contingent of Carolina fans calling themselves the “Canefederacy,” with Civil War memes built around the hurricane warning flag. That flag logo, a hockey stick standing on end with two red flags waving from it, is one of the best in sports, and it wasn’t around when I was in Raleigh twenty years earlier.

And who were the Canes playing in the Eastern Conference Final? The big bad Canadiens. Down 1-0, Nikolaj Ehlers hit a spinning OT winner in Game 2. I had to be a part of this. I signed up for YouTube TV and watched Game 3, my first hockey game on television in over three years. Claude Lemieux carried the torch into the Bell Centre (in what would be his last public appearance), the building was going crazy, and then I saw what the Canes were all about. A chaotically aggressive style of hockey I can’t remember ever seeing played at this level. I couldn’t watch it passively like I used to. Everything happening on the ice mattered.

That’s when I learned the frequency of being a hockey spectator.

Every sport has its own cadence. Football is great for our modern attention spans — watch a play, check your phone, run to the fridge, and you’ve got 30 seconds before the next snap. Baseball lets you fill in the blanks with your own thoughts, managing the bullpen in your head between pitches. Soccer took patience for me, but rewards it with some of the highest skill in sports. Hockey was the most elusive. You can’t watch it passively. You can’t look away every sixty seconds.

The 2026 Canes taught me this: lock in. Give it about 45 minutes a period, come up for air at the TV timeouts and the intermission. Stay focused, watch the pressure and shape, the line changes, the dump and chase, the zone resets. You stop trying to find the tiny puck, and you start seeing the ten men on the ice as a living organism, its ebbs and flows. Then at the drop of a hat a couple quick passes open up a sliver of daylight, a shot rings out, the horn blares, and you feel either glory or disappointment. Finally cracking that frequency, along with a team I truly enjoyed watching, gave me the sport in a way I’d never fully appreciated.

And these Canes tied me back to those games twenty years ago. Eric Staal’s younger brother Jordan, now 38, captains the current team. He scored one of the greatest goals I’ve ever seen — falling down, facing away from the net, he swung his stick with his left hand and caught just enough of the puck to lift it over a leaping goalie. A one-in-a-million shot that’s only possible when every part of your being is determined to succeed.

Rod Brind’Amour, the captain of that ’06 team, is now the head coach. Rod the Bod suffered several heartbreaking playoff exits in his first seven years behind the bench, but this team carried no hangover. Ehlers came over from Winnipeg and unlocked the offense the pace-of-play kings had been missing, and Brind’Amour got them playing a level of ego-less hockey I don’t know that I’ve seen night in and night out in any sport.

The Canes knocked off the Canadiens in five, then fell behind 2-1 in the Final against a star-studded Vegas team. They rattled off three straight and brought the Cup home to Raleigh, exactly 20 years after 2006.

Now I get to watch them all season long. And those Sharks who never reached the promised land? They have Macklin Celebrini, the best young player in the league, and have won the draft lottery multiple times over. I watched the first round of the NHL draft this summer. Yes, really, for the first time in my life. I was thrilled when the Sharks took Swedish winger Ivar Stenberg second overall.

It’s funny how when people have reasonable access to see your games, they become fans. What a concept.

I don’t just watch now because I want to see hockey. I want to see discipline, dedication, sacrifice, selflessness, and relentless fury all in concert toward a common goal. When delivered at the highest level, as the Hurricanes put on display last spring, that’s what makes sports so special. That’s why people watch. That’s why people care.