content warning: contains discussion of mental health and suicidal ideation
When I was nineteen years old I was not doing very well.
I do not need to make that more poetic than it is. I was a sad kid in a hard season of life, the kind of sad that does not always have a visible shape, the kind that sits very quietly somewhere beneath the sternum and makes the future feel like a country that requires a passport you have not been issued. I was nineteen and I could not see very far forward. Not past the week I was in, not past the month, certainly not into some easy and uncomplicated future where things were simply fine and I was simply in them.
And in the middle of all of that, I made myself a promise.
I want to be honest about what the promise was and where it came from, because I think the honesty is the point of writing this at all. It was not some grand and luminous moment of clarity. It was not a revelation. It was smaller than that, and stranger, and in some ways more embarrassing, and I think that is precisely why it worked.
I promised myself I would stay until the Minnesota Wild won the Stanley Cup.
That was it. That was the whole thing.
I want to be clear that I was not a Wild fan in any deeper sense past fandom at nineteen. The team was not the reason. The team was just the thing I reached for, the shape my brain produced when it went looking for something far enough away to be worth the distance, something concrete enough to hold, something I could point to in the dark and say: that. That is the thing I have not seen yet. And obviously there were other factors in play, other things I left my claw marks behind in. But this promise was almost a representation of it.
Maybe I chose it because it was so far-fetched that it functioned almost like a joke I was telling myself, a way of dressing the whole thing up in something that felt less heavy than it was. Maybe I chose it because I am, at my core, a coward, and a hockey team was easier to say out loud inside my own head than the real and actual thing I was bargaining with. Probably both. Probably it was the genius of the desperate mind, which is very good at finding the side door when the front door feels impossible.
Whatever the reason, I made the deal. And then something happened that I did not anticipate but probably should have expected.
The Minnesota Wild proceeded to be absolutely terrible at winning the Stanley Cup.
They found variations on the theme with a creativity that bordered on artistic. Good enough to get there, not quite good enough to stay, reliably present for the first two weeks of April and reliably absent by the third. A franchise that has made practice of the almost.
And every year, I stayed.
The first few years I stayed because of the promise. Because I had said I would, and the promise was doing what promises are supposed to do, which is hold you in place when you cannot hold yourself. But somewhere along the way the reason shifted, so gradually I could not locate the moment it happened. I stayed because Kaprizov arrived and changed what the ceiling looked like. I stayed because the young core started to become something identifiable. I stayed because I found a community inside this sport and a way of thinking about it that felt like mine, and because April started to feel less like a door closing and more like a season I actually wanted to be present for.
I stayed because things got better.
Not because of the Wild. The Wild were not the reason things got better. The Wild were the thread I followed out of a dark room, and the thread led somewhere it had no business leading, which was to a life I am genuinely glad to be living. The team was the excuse. The world on the other side was the reward. You take the exit that is available to you and you do not interrogate it too hard and you just keep walking until the light changes.
Here is what I know now that I did not know at nineteen: you cannot always reason your way out of the dark with large and abstract ideas. The future is too far away when you are that deep in it. Five years is not a real thing. A decade isn’t real. What is real is the thing directly in front of you, the small and almost embarrassingly concrete thing you can hold in both hands and say: I need to do this first.
It almost has to be something a little absurd. Something with enough distance to it that getting there requires you to keep moving. Something that asks you, without asking, to remain curious about what happens next. To stay interested in the outcome. To keep one eye on the calendar and the bracket and the standings, because the standings are a reason to open your laptop in the morning and the bracket is a reason to care about April and caring about April is, it turns out, a way of being alive in it.
A hockey team held that when I could not.. That is all it was. That is everything it was.
I am twenty-five now. I am sincerely, fully, okay in a way that has solidity to it, that knows what it was made of, that does not take ordinary afternoons for granted the way it might have otherwise. I am getting a doctoral degree in something I love. I write about hockey on the internet with a sincerity that does not embarrass me. I have a life that I am inside of, all the way, in a way that the version of me at nineteen could not have pictured even on her best days.
The promise I made has long since expired in any technical sense. I do not need it anymore. I am not here because of a deal. I am here because it got better, slowly and then more quickly and then in ways I could not have predicted, and because somewhere along the way I became a person who wanted to be here for reasons that had nothing to do with hockey and everything to do with what turned out to be on the other side of that dark season.
But I think about that promise sometimes. I think about what it means that this was the shape my mind produced when it went looking for something to hold. I think about the slightly absurd mercy of it, that the thing keeping me tethered to the future was a hockey franchise in Saint Paul that would go on to exit the playoffs in the first round eight consecutive times. I think about what that nineteen year old needed and what she found, even if what she found was, for many years, mostly heartbreak in April.
It was enough. It was exactly enough. It kept the thread intact until there was more thread, and then more, and then enough to build something with.
So when it finally happens, and I have decided it is going to happen, when the Minnesota Wild win the Stanley Cup and the green confetti falls and Spurge lifts it and Saint Paul becomes something unrecognizable with joy, I will be there for it.
Not because of a promise. Because I want to be. Because I have been watching this team for long enough that I have earned the right to be completely undone by it when it finally comes. Because I am someone who stayed and staying turned out to be the best thing I ever did, and this is one of the things I stayed for, and I would like to be present when it arrives.
And when the confetti comes down, I will think about a girl who was nineteen and could not see very far forward and reached for the most far-fetched thing she could find and held onto it in the dark.
She made it to the parade.
She is so glad she stayed.
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