Missing Out

So the day finally came. I knew it would be here eventually, though I tried to convince myself it would never come to this. I put it off as long as I could, but I could not deny it any longer.

The day came where I chose soccer... over my family.

Okay, that's a bit more dramatic than what actually happened. It's not like I abandoned Cleo to go to a futsal game. The US National Team was playing a World Cup Qualifier in Seattle. Despite being a HUGE national team fan, I've never seen the Nats play and my friend Chris got tickets!

Except... it was on a Tuesday, a day semi sacred to me and little C.

If that wasn't bad enough... it was also on mine and H's anniversary!

And I chose soccer.

Now, before I get tarred and feathered, it's often said that men in families only communicate their love through their shared interests. For my father and I, it was soccer and comic books.

My love of the Nats goes back to 1989 and a Paul Caliguri goal that booked the US back to the World Cup for the first time in over half a century that made both me and my father, both soccer nuts, feel like there was hope in this country for the sport we loved. Sure, it's kind of silly to put so much stock into a game, but this was back in the day where they made jokes about soccer being un-American and that people who liked it were commies. For guys like my dad and I who were passionate about soccer, being able to dress up in the Stars and Stripes IN ORDER TO support soccer was a vindication.

Someday soon, I'll just take her with me.

I remember vividly that my father bought a Soccer America magazine that had all of the US players for Italia 90 profiled in it like trading cards and I had them all memorized! In the years since, we would sometimes get together to watch the Nats play on TV and often talked about the team, especially in years like this leading up to the next World Cup. When we couldn't get together, we sometimes would call and stay on the phone while we watched the same game.

So when the tickets went on sale a week after my father died it was a balm upon my soul for me to buy one. (To be fair, I didn't realize it was on a Tuesday and H forgot that June 11th is our anniversary when she cleared me to buy them.)

Because I had to work on the 16th, we really didn't get to do much for Father's Day this year. But in all honesty, getting a free pass from my family to watch the US win and go to the top of the Hexagonal... to feel that my father's spirit was with me watching Altidore score a goal... well, for me, Father's Day was June 11th this year. USA!

Branching Out

I've been learning a lot this year with blogging. It's pretty fascinating to look back at my older posts and see how my style is developing even in such a short time. The development is uneven, a  two steps forward and one step back kind of thing, but very fun for me to observe. One thing I've learned is that, while I love writing about soccer, it gives a disjointed feel to this blog. The friends and family who read this blog enjoy my observations about life and becoming a dad, but tend to skip the soccer stuff.

Based on this, I've been trying to find other outlets for the soccer posts. I recently emailed Slide Rule Pass about contributing occasionally, got some encouraging feedback, and sent my most recent post to them instead of putting it here.

And he actually put the post up!

We'll see how I handle the feedback I get from a site with a much higher circulation than this little blog, but hopefully it'll build my confidence (At least for now I'm all smiles!). I'll continue to link to whatever I'm able to get published elsewhere and give you all a respite from the soccer articles here!

Hoping for the Future

Oh those Timbers. This has been a humbling year. I think a lot of us (maybe even Timbers management) thought that since the Timbers have the best supporters, there was no way they could be terrible. Maybe they wouldn't have a great season, but not terrible. Terrible is what happens to those teams in the non soccer fanatical areas of the country where they have trouble filling a stadium. Not Soccer City though!

And yet... here we are. Not as bad as Toronto, but we're fighting to not end up with the Wooden Spoon. Lets face it, there isn't any hope left for this year, and I would even go so far as to say that includes the Cascadia Cup. We could barely tie Seattle at home! Sure, I'll cheer on October 7th, but I'm going to be realistic about it.

As the days get darker here in the NW signifying the shift to dreary winter and the looming specter of seasonal affective disorder, I feel it's important to stay optimistic about next season. Thankfully, there ARE things to be optimistic about.

1) Creativity.  I think that one of the failings of John Spencer was that he didn't know what to do with creative players. James Marcelin, let go from the Timbers for "non soccer related reasons", is by no means Iniesta and definitely had a bone to pick with the Timbers front office, but a quote of his really stuck with me in the early part of the season. Marcelin stated after being picked up by Dallas "I can say this coach is more relaxed and lets you play your game. Spencer doesn't let you do that, he's just yelling all the time."

Watching some of those early games in the season, I saw a lot of players that were afraid to make mistakes. You can't take a player like Songo'o and expect him to play perfect defense. That's just not what he is out there to do. He is out there to be the creative engine, and that means trying ludicrous step-over moves that sometimes don't pan out. There were at least two games where Songo'o was the only creative sparkplug on the field, and yet Spencer subbed him because he wasn't adhering to his gameplan.

I don't think it's a coincidence that Songo'o and Nagbe have really blossomed since Spencer left. There's a lightness and a willingness to be daring on the field. Sure, we haven't put it all together tactically, but it's a sign that things are transitioning to something more open.

2) Developing a Style.  Kevin at Slide Rule Pass (an amazing Timbers blog!) summed it up best when he described the method the Timbers acquire players as "magpie like". We see a good player at a decent rate and we grab, with no thought to whether or not he fits into our style of play. It's part of the reason we ended up with this weird Scotch-Columbian mix of players. This may have been due to us either not having a style or due to a conflict between Spencer's vision and the vision of Paulson and Wilkinson. Either way, the roster looks the product of a confused soccer hoarder.

Currently it feels like the Timbers are trying to sort through and figure some of this out. We are feeling out a style, trying out players in it, seeing who fits and who is Kris Boyd (or something like that), and ultimately just setting the stage for having an actual plan for next year. Which brings us to...

3) Caleb Porter.  I was really excited when Porter was appointed the National U-23 coach. What better man to develop the national team youth than the man who routinely churns out stars from Akron! Unfortunately, that didn't pan out when the US failed to qualify for the Olympics and Porter got burned as the scapegoat; unfairly in my opinion. He didn't really have long to work with the team (he started in October 2011, had one training camp, and then off to the Olympic qualifiers in early 2012) and while the scorelines tell a sad story, we really only failed to qualify based on a fluke goal.  He was also able to get some truly inspired performances from the mercurial and inconsistent Freddy Adu.

Klinsman's loss is our gain though. We've already seen a shift from Spencer's rigid style to a more open style that I can't imagine Porter has not had input on. Additionally, I would think we may shift from buying MLS veterans like Kimura, Palmer, and Chabala as stop-gap measures to patch up a sinking ship to a focus on developing youth. This, however, means that we will likely struggle next season as we blood more of the young players (Trencito, Gleeson, Jean Baptiste, Richards, and whatever youth we snatch up in the offseason) and focus on building for the future rather than victories now.

My take: We're not going to transition overnight and realistically we will not be a title contender until 2014 at the earliest. That said, next year is going to be more fun and exciting! We will have an opportunity to watch our team develop and grow into something better, which really is the true fun of being a fan!

First Game Back

No matter how hard you work in the off-season, the first game back to outdoor soccer hurts. I'm not sure why GPSD has a 2-3 month hiatus from July until September for soccer seasons other than some sense of gleeful cruelty. It's just enough time to get completely out of game shape but not enough time to realize it.

Kind of what it looked like

I thought that I was doing relatively well this year. I was biking every day to work and back, was playing futsal once a week, and was making practice whenever my schedule allowed. Unfortunately, on my first juke of the season where I moved past a faked out defender, the momentary rush of accomplishment  was ground into the dirt when I saw that I had about 40 more yards left to run to get to the goal.


The next day was a world of pain. I wasn't just sore. I had also been kicked and hacked by rusty, sloppy defenders so my shins and ankles were scraped and cramped as well as the fact that my feet, not used to outdoor cleats for the last few months, developed blisters. There was a point the next day when I was creaking, groaning, and staggering out of bed that I thought to myself "Oh crap. I'm going to have a screaming infant here next season who will require me to creak, stagger and groan myself out of bed to tend to her!" I'm hoping she'll be able to understand the concept of "injury time" relatively soon since I may need a minute or two added on to get there!

Futsal

Recently I've switched from playing indoor soccer to futsal and I've got to say that after the Apocalypse, I think futsal will be one of the sports still around. Indoor soccer requires a rink with plexiglass and barriers all around the edges. The local Portalnd Futsal center is just a converted warehouse with chain link fences surrounding the fields and heavy metal blasting over the speakers. Throw in a few flaming sconces at the corners and maybe make spiked shoulder pads a requirement and you've got something out of Thunderdome.

Spin the wheel raggedy man!

The good: Accurate passing is really important.  I feel like this is really going to improve my passing game.

The bad:  You end up using the bottom of your foot a lot more for moves. In a place like Portland where half of your outdoor games are going to be in mud and rain, the bottom of your foot is the most unreliable place to anchor any juke from. 

It's taken me a bit to adjust to.  The pace is faster, positioning is different, there's an actual out of bounds, and they count fouls kind of like how they do in basketball, giving a pk for teams after the foul count goes over 5.  

In fact, I finally started to get the hang of futsal when I realized it is not really soccer. It's basketball you play with your feet.  Just watch the movement on the following video and it's easy to see.

Outdoor soccer starts this weekend and H and I are eager to see if playing futsal will help my skills this season!  I'll keep you posted!

The Curious Case of Clint Dempsey

As an American and an Arsenal fan, there's few things more conflictual for me than Clint Dempsey.  Dempsey has been linked with transfer rumors to Arsenal for years. At this point he is the best player that the US has ever produced, leading Fulham and scoring the 4th most goals in the English Premier League; breaking the record for the amount of goals an American has ever scored in the EPL. No American field player (not counting goalies) has ever represented us at a top Championship League club (Man U, Barcelona, Inter Milan, etc) as anything more than an experiment. At 29 with only one year left on his contract, a lot of us in the States view this as our last, best chance for a while to see one of our own competing at the top level of football.

And yet.... many Arsenal fans don't want him there. Some of this is simply anti-American bias. They feel that American fans overrate him or that he is not young enough to benefit a team upon. These are really laughable points. On the first, he scored 17 goals last year! For the second, look at Ryan Giggs. Thirty eight years old and still playing for Man U. These days, only speedsters have an age 30 expiration date. The skillful and gritty can go for a long time. The only point brought up that does bother me is where he would fit in at The Emirates.

Dempsey plays either a winger, an attacking midfielder, and sometimes as striker. Arsenal is filled to the gills with wingers and has an assortment of attacking midfielders. Until striker and club icon Robin van Persie made his shocking announcement recently that he is done with Arsenal, there was really no room for him.  As an American fan, though, I still would be worried about playing time. Without consistent time on the field, it's possible he would fade.

The development of Americans in Europe is storied.  For every Clint Dempsey who goes to Europe and becomes a star, you have a handful of guys like Freddy Adu, a player with potential who sees it go to waste while riding the pine. This isn't just an American problem.  In Mexico, for every Chicharito, you have a Giovani dos Santos or a Carlos Vela; unquestionably talented players who cannot find time on the field.

Jozy Altidore. No longer his natural habitat!

To be a star, a player needs two things: 1) to play at the top level they can and 2) to get sufficient field time. What happens in the case of guys like Jozy Altidore is that they overshoot point one and end up with none of point two. It doesn't matter if the club can afford a bench made of fine polished agarwood or cheap pine, you don't get better by sitting on it.  Thankfully Jozy has figured this out, and instead of being a benchwarmer in a top league like La Liga or the EPL, he is content to be a starter in the Dutch league which is a technically a step down from the others but has done wonders for his skill.

Sadly, all of this hemming and hawing about Dempsey for Arsenal have left an opening for Liverpool who might swoop in and get him.  I've never been a huge fan of the Reds, but browsing their forums indicates they, at least, would appreciate him. Throw in Liverpool's stance to become one of the few professional sports teams in the world to openly declare their support of the LGBT community and march against homophobia and I'll be forced to HAVE to become a Liverpool supporter (Thankfully Arsenal and Liverpool aren't direct rivals like, say, Tottenahm or Chelsea).  Of course, Dempsey might never get a local bar named after him like Brian McBride did, but at least he would be playing on a high profile team!

Local Legends

The Timbers Army and the ECS of Seattle have had a long running competition of tifos; large banners that cover a good part of the stadium that have recently become symbolic of the rivalry between the two teams. Last year, the Sounders really won that war with a four part tifo paying tribute to past (and current) legends. The Timbers Army followed it up with an adequate but not groundbreaking tifo of their own. At the game this Sunday, the Timbers Army revealed a tifo that caused confusion in some fans, mainly due to the sleepy eyed, lightly afroed man depicted in the middle of it with the saying "Legends are born when the previous are surpassed." Impressive, beautiful, and baffling for those of us unfamiliar with who the man was.

So the guy in the middle is Clive Charles, a local legend. He played for the original Timbers from 78 to 81.  He then played Major Indoor Soccer League for the LA Lazers for a while, but retired in 82 specifically to move his family back to the place he loved and coach soccer in the Portland area. Four years later he began coaching at the University of Portland and founded Portland FC.  In his time with the Pilots, he coached the likes of Kasey Keller, Steve Cherundulo, and Shannon MacMillan. He was one of the assistant coaches for the 1998 US World Cup team and coached the 2000 men's Olympic team. He died in 2003 from prostate cancer. He is considered a vital component of the creation of Portland's soccer culture and a lot of stuff in Portland that is soccer related is named after him.

The tifo does bring up a valid point about our lack of soccer legends in the States. I wrote recently about seeing a NASL Sounders game while growing up, but honestly, I wouldn't be able to name a single Sounder from that time period. From a recent Goal.com article featuring interviews with MLS VP Todd Durbin and Thiery Henry:

Durbin argues that the biggest weakness that MLS has in attracting athletes and fans to the league is the lack of history that soccer has in America. Unlike in Europe, where some teams have been around for over 100 years, MLS debuted in 1996. The MLS executive believes that most aspiring athletes and sports fans envision themselves as the popular players in the currently established sports leagues.

…

Henry agrees with Durbin in that respect.  "It's hard when you grew in a house where your dad is always talking to you about a team. Then you grow wanting to be that guy [on the team]," says Henry. "That's also what you're competing against, you're competing against history."

 In the current Timbers squad, they don't have anyone of legendary quality and the only one likely to become a "legend" is possibly Jack Jewsbury, although more for his spirit and work ethic in captaining the new Timbers in their first few seasons. In contrast, the Sounders already have Kasey Keller, Roger Levesque, and a debatable burgeoning legend in Freddy Montero.


The tifos last year were more about taking jabs at each other, but not so much with this one. "Legends are born when the previous are surpassed" is definitely a taunt, but it really isn't directed at the Sounders and is more of an attempt to urge the Timbers to become something more. I hope they heed that call.

Cascadia Cup

This weekend is the first clash between the Timbers and the Sounders of the season. While I consider myself a Timber these days, the derby always provokes such conflicted feelings for me. Honestly, I feel like I'm one of the few people around who can legitimately call themselves a Cascadian.

Before the Rave Green

In 1982, the Seattle Sounders of the NASL made a dream run to the championships, though they eventually lost to the Cosmos. Somewhere during this time, my parents got tickets to what I believe was one of the playoff games. This was the first and, unfortunately, the only soccer game I attended during my childhood as the NASL would fold a few short years later. At the time, the Sounders won though!  The city was crazy and I remember people honking horns and yelling "Go Sounders!" on the drive out of Seattle (we were too poor to afford a hotel room in Seattle, so we drove back to Yakima after the game.)  My take from this game: a Seattle Sounders t-shirt.  I don't remember who we played, but I remember this shirt fondly and wore it a lot.

Before Timber Joey was Timber Jim!

Fast forward about 20 years. The MLS has been around for a good 10 years at this point, but pointedly ignores the pacific northwest. I had moved down to Portland for grad school and was getting back into soccer. That's when I heard about the Timbers Army. These crazy fans that came out, sang songs, beat drums, and cheered all for a mediocre USL team. It was so very Portland! You could just show up at the gates, get a ticket for $10, and be part of this European atmosphere where Timber Jim would fire up a chainsaw for the fans. It was great. While I never considered myself part of the Timbers army, I loved going to games and sitting in the GA section. For me, it really re-awakened a love for being a fan of the game and I truly considered myself a Timber

Drew Carey leading a March to the Match

Time moves on though, and H and I ended up moving back to the Puget Sound area where the Sounders were. The rivalry was fierce between Sounder and Timber even in the USL days, though, and I didn't have much interest in becoming a Sounder fan. Something cool happened, though. The Sounders moved up to MLS! Since the Timbers were USL and would only meet Seattle once in a blue moon in the US Open Cup, I could be fans of both! That first Sounders year was a great year, too. The Sounders had recruited local hero and one of my idols Kasey Keller! They had the March to the Match before games, often led by Drew Carey, where supporters marched blocks to the game with a parade band, singing songs and ending at Qwest Field where a carnival atmosphere was going on. H was really won over by the Sounders during this time and frankly, still considers herself a Sounder. Meanwhile, I also followed the Timbers online, my only conflicted moment being the clash in the US Open Cup that elevated Roger Levesque to infamy.

Things didn't work out for us up north, and H and I moved back down to Portland. Then, for me, one of the worst things happened:  Portland landed a promotion to MLS. The Rivalry was back on and now in full effect and I could no longer have my cake and eat it too. In situations like this, people don't respond well to you calling yourself a neutral and goad you into taking a side. In some ways I understand it. Attempting to "rise above the fray" smacks of pretentiousness. On the other hand, I do feel like I'm one of the few people out there who has a legitimate claim to both teams.

This time of year, I sigh, and I put on the Timber colors for the game, since if forced to choose, I go with the local team.  I'll cheer for the Timbers, but what I'm really cheering for is a tie.

Soccer Stole My Updates!

Sorry all for the lack of updates lately. I've been a bit obsessed with the European Championship which has sucked up most of the free time I would normally use to write.  Seriously, today there were two games at the same time so I had the Spain vs Croatia game on my laptop, Italy vs Ireland on may iPad, and was following commentary on my phone. Once the group stages end there won't be every day games, so I'll get more consistent. Until then, here's Danny Welbeck's awesome goal against Sweden!

The Losing Season

Everyone likes a winner.  However, I've never really followed a losing team before.  I've BEEN (and currently am) on a losing team, but never followed one.  It takes a combination of passion for the sport and passion for the team that allows you to include yourself as a fan.  I've never considered myself a Seahawks or Mariners fan mostly because  I simply don't follow the sports.  In soccer, I've been an Arsenal fan since the mid 90's so the biggest pain I've had is under achieving and coming in 4th (Oh the pain!).  The closest I would say I've been to being a fan of a losing team is following the US national team as we bomb out of the World Cup and most other international tournaments again and again and again.

The Timbers are officially a losing team. While we played a fantastic game against Columbus on Saturday, it ended in a 0-0 tie.  This makes it 6 games since we've won a game and we've lost 5 out of those 6.  I'm sure if my younger self could time travel, he'd punch me in the face for making this statement, but it can be kind of fun to be the losing team.  Yes, I understand that this sounds un-American, but let me explain.

I only scored four goals this game.  Maybe it's my fault...

A winning team is perfect.  The problem with perfection is that it is static.  Boring.  However, it can't stay that way, so you fight this constant battle against entropy that you will always lose.  Case in point is Pep Guardiola, coach of Barcelona.  He's been coach for 4 years and has constructed what is widely considered to be one of the best teams that soccer has ever produced.  Yet he is stepping down.  Why?  The pressure.  When Barcelona plays another team, anything less than a beautiful AND dominant victory IS a failure.  An actual loss is a catastrophe!  So now there can be no low expectation games.  If Arsenal beats West Brom by one goal, we're happy.  If Barcelona beats Malaga by one goal, we ask what went wrong.  Therein lies madness, or at least ulcers.

Although not getting to see the chainsaw is demoralizing.

A losing team can be changed at whim.  Fans can speculate on roster changes they would make, transfers they would go for, formations they think should be tried.  Of course too much chaos and change is bad since a team will never settle, but for the most part, the team is a sandbox.  You can be daring and unconventional with your theories and strategies and not worry too much since what is the worst that can happen?

Old Man Soccer

So I'm at the mid point of playing in an over 30 soccer league. When you first enter at age 30, you feel like freakin Maradona circa 1984. You are faster, more agile, and have better endurance than the other people in the league.  By the time you leave, you look like Maradona circa 2008.

There is a legend in Argentina that once, in fit of rage during a World Cup game, Maradona ate the game ball 

Currently I'm not a liability, but I'm also not the prized asset I was 5 years ago. I can sprint up the field or down it, but not up AND down it. My team is also in last place in the over 30 third division. This is a very humbling situation. Out of all the middle aged guys in Portland who play soccer, we are currently the worst. Thankfully, things are getting better. We are gelling a bit more and trying out new formations has brought us closer to the win column.

The weird thing about these old man leagues is that the competitiveness never really dies out even if you are the worst middle aged soccer team.  When you are young, sports are a blazing sun; defining your daily and seasonal activities.  When you are old, that fire burns low.  Jobs, wives, kids, and responsibility block it all out, but it's still stoked.  One bad call by a ref and it blazes.  A part in the back of my head is rationally saying, "You work in crisis services.  You calm people down on a day to day basis.  It's your job to keep a level head."  Meanwhile, my mouth is telling the ref he is goddamn moron.  Then the yellow card comes out and I leave the field, high-fiving my sub as he runs on.

C'mon fellas!  Let's stick it to the Kaiser and do this for the Gipper!

As with most men of my generation, I think we struggle with how to define ourselves as an adult.  The symbols of the past (wife, property, kids, pension) are more or less gone or irrelevant and now we search desperately for signs to let us know we have transitioned out of the man-child stage.  Frankly, I don't think men of the past really were much more "grown up" than we are, but the signposts they had gave them a sense of progress (though they also limited the routes they could take).  This leaves modern men with this odd hazy concept of maturity; kind of an all or nothing mentality.  Ron Swanson vs Andy Dwyer if you will.  Anyhow, I'm not quite sure where I'm going with this post, but I think lately what I've been learning is that maturity doesn't have to be a universal trait.  As long as you know how to be an adult and how to yank yourself back into that mode when it's required, it's all right to act like a kid.

Suck it youngster!

When Kasey Keller had a Mullet

Patton Oswalt wrote an article fairly recently about the rise of the geek.  It's a great piece that really points out the glory and fallacy of geek chic culture.  On the one hand it is no longer shameful to be a geek.  You can fly that geek flag with pride!  On the other hand, anyone can be a geek without trying.  This is anathema to the whole point of being a geek really.  A weekend of Netflix watching and someone can talk like a Star Trek veteran, but the geekiness was never incubated.  Instead of a fine wine we have this fast food wine that only some people can tell is inferior.

Miles Raymond: [while tasting wine] It tastes like the back of a fucking L.A. school bus. Now they probably didn't de-stem, hoping for some semblance of concentration, crushed it up with leaves and mice, and then wound up with this rancid tar and turpentine bullshit. Fuckin' Raid.

Jack: Tastes pretty good to me.

My lens for viewing this is from being a soccer fanatic growing up.  It's hard to explain to people who are into soccer now just what that meant in the 80's.  The Pele fueled NASL league died a horrible, writhing death on the floor of the early 80's (Once in a Lifetime is a great documentary on this!), the US couldn't qualify for a world cup, and American soccer became a wasteland.  There were few stations in the US that showed soccer.  The ones that did usually showed soccer from Mexico or Argentina; good leagues, but not close to the star powered European leagues.   There was no internet, so your only hope of getting league standings was from strange English magazines that made little sense to an American teenager.  The closest I got to seeing a pro soccer match was professional indoor soccer, a bastardized version of soccer manufactured for people with attention deficit disorder.

Most high schools did not offer soccer programs or (even more degrading for a guy) only offered girls soccer.  Football coaches or worse, baseball coaches (from a soccer point of view, baseball seems the physical exertion equivalent of having a picnic), would mock soccer as anti-American and encouraged their players to do the same.  Hell, some of them openly felt that getting kids to play soccer was a communist plot.  You had to be strong of character to play soccer back then.

This started to change when Paul Caligiuri launched the US into the World Cup for the first time in 40 years.  I remember reading a big, newspapery profile of every US World Cup player in the first issue of Soccer America featuring, as backup goalkeeper in a picture he likely wishes was banned from the internet, a young Kasey Keller, the man now synonymous with Northwest US soccer.

Business in front, party in the back of the goal.

We sucked.  It was damn near impossible to find these games on TV, but I found the games, watched them suck, and watched with pride.  From these ashes of suckiness arose Major League Soccer.  Twenty years later and here I am in the Northwest, unable to buy tickets to soccer matches due to games selling out at high prices.  People who don't know who Tab Ramos, Claudio Renya, or even Steve Cherundolo are, who couldn't tell you what NASL stands for, and some who only puzzled out what an offside trap is a few years ago are now screaming songs and waving flags at games.

In a lot of ways, I can't help but feel like how a grizzled 80's punk rocker must have felt when Green Day became big.  This weird mix of happiness and bitterness.  I like how popular soccer is and yet I feel like my passion has been co-opted; that years of service to the sport should entitle me to buy tickets to the game when I want and at a discount.  And yet... it's so nice to have people to talk to about the sport... even if I do have to educate people with green painted faces on what aggregate goal count means.