Puck It We Ball

In my house, sports were a women’s thing.

I know how that sounds, because it’s the opposite of how the story usually goes. My dad is blue collar down to the marrow, the kind of man who measures a good day by what he fixed, what he hauled, and what he built with his own hands. My brother took after him. Neither of them has ever needed a scoreboard to feel like a day meant something. Ask them who won on Sunday and you’ll get a shrug and a change of subject.

So the games belong to us. The standings, the superstitions, the yelling at a television that can not hear us, all of it is ours. And at the center of it, in her chair with her arms crossed and her jaw set, is my mom.

She is a New York Giants fan. A long-suffering one, which I’ve come to believe is the only honest kind. She has spent fifty years loving a team that has handed her more heartbreak than victory, and she has never once treated that love as a mistake. She sits through the bad seasons. She sits through the Sundays that end in silence. Then she shows up the next week, hopeful all over again, like nobody told her how it ended last time.

When I was little, I thought that was just what sports looked like. Then I got out into the world and found out my house was the exception. Somewhere along the way, when I was just a little girl, I was told that sports were a “boy thing,” and I honestly didn’t understand. I remember waiting for the punchline. The biggest, loudest, most knowledgeable sports fan I knew was my mother, and she was not a boy. She knew the rules, the rosters, and exactly which referee deserved her wrath that week. 

I remember being confused first, then a little indignant, and then going home and watching her yell at Eli Manning on television like nothing in the world could be more natural. In that moment I decided, with the total certainty that the world was wrong and my living room was right. I haven’t changed my mind.

It took me years to understand though that what I was watching something much rarer: a woman practicing faith in something she couldn’t control.

I think that living room, on that old green couch, is where I became a person.

I’m not sure if she knew what she was teaching me back in those days. Learning how to lose without letting it hollow me out. Learning that you can be furious at a team and still love it completely. Learning that hope isn’t naïve when you choose it with your eyes open. Nobody sat me down and taught me those things. I absorbed them from that green couch, one frustrating fourth quarter at a time, next to a woman who modeled all of it without ever calling it a lesson.

And then there was hockey.

I don’t remember exactly how it found me, this kid in West Virginia raised on football and summer sun. But I remember that when it did, I didn’t have to explain it to her. She didn’t need to understand the neutral zone or the difference between a good change and a bad one. She understood the important thing, the thing that makes a person love a team in the first place. So she learned the rest because I loved it. She asked about the Wild. She learned the names. She started asking me how the game went, and she actually wanted to know.

That might be the best thing a mother can do and I think that’s the magic of a mother like mine. She has never once believed I couldn’t do something. Not when I wanted to chase a sport that wasn’t hers, and not when I wanted to build a life far from the house I grew up in. When I left home for the first time, she cried. and I won’t pretend it wasn’t hard for both of us. But she opened the door anyway. She held it wide, and she let me walk through.

It’s the same thing she did with hockey. She never needed me to love what she loved, and she never needed me to stay where she could see me. Her love was never a leash.

So no, I didn’t end up a Giants fan. I became something so much better: a person who believes that she belongs in the room, because the first woman I ever knew never doubted that I did.

Now I write about hockey. I spend my days researching how this sport treats the people who play it, and my nights writing about a team I love in a state I didn’t grow up in. When people ask how a girl from WV ended up here, I have a simple answer. It started in a living room, with a remote and a woman who taught me that being a fan is really just being faithful.

Here is what I know about her, beyond the football and the fandom.

She is the most resilient person I have ever met. She has carried more than she ever let on, and she did it quietly, without speeches, without asking anyone to notice. Whatever life put in front of her, she met it the way she meets fourth-and-long: shoulders squared, no intention of leaving before the game was over.

She is tough as hell. She is also the softest place I know how to land.

I think about that combination a lot, especially in my line of work. Sports love a certain kind of toughness, the loud kind, the play-through-it kind, the kind that gets turned into a highlight reel. I’ve spent years studying what that kind of toughness costs. But the toughness I learned at home never needed an audience. It was patient. It was private. It looked like getting up, doing the next right thing, and loving people through it. If I ever write anything worth reading, it’ll be because I measured every other kind of strength against hers.

Every time I sit down to watch a game, I’m sitting next to her, wherever she is. Every time I stay through a loss, I’m doing what she taught me. Every time I believe in something before it gives me a reason, that’s her.

I’ve waited this whole post to tell you her name, because I wanted you to know her first.

It’s Joy.

Of course it is. A woman who has spent a lifetime loving things that could break her heart, and chose to love them anyway, with her whole heart, every single time. She never needed to be handed a reason for it.

She is one.

People assume joy is the easy thing, the light thing, the thing that shows up when the team wins. But I watched my mother build it out of the hard seasons. Joy, in my house, was never the absence of loss. It was a decision, made again every Sunday, to stay in the room and stay hopeful anyway. She made it look effortless, and I know now how much effort it took.

These days, we do our fandom over the phone. Sometimes we call each other mid-game, even though our streams never quite line up. One of us is always a few seconds ahead, which means one of us is reacting to something the other hasn’t seen yet. I’ve groaned at a penalty she hasn’t watched happen. She’s gasped at a goal I’m still waiting on. We spoil each other constantly and never mind, because the point was never the timing. The point is the voice on the other end of the line.

And every Sunday morning, no matter what else the week held, we call to recap the college football from the night before. We go play by play, argue about the calls, and decide who got robbed. It’s become our ritual, the one fixed point in the week, and it might be the thing I’d miss most if I could only keep one. Nothing about the result matters in those minutes. We just get to be two people who love the same thing, talking about it like it’s the most important thing in the world, because in that moment, it is.

So here’s what I want her to know, in case she’s reading this and rolling her eyes.

Thank you for staying until the final whistle, every time. Thank you for opening the door. Thank you for showing me that you can be the toughest person in the room and the most tender one at once. Thank you for making me the woman I am and if I am ever half the woman you are, I will be happy. Thank you for teaching  me otherwise, before the world could, that I belonged in the room.

And thank you for being, in every sense of the word, my Joy.

I’ll call you Sunday.