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(Photo Credit: Evan Michael)

By: Evan Michael | Follow me on Twitter @Evan007onTV

“Hooray for Hockeywood” if you enjoy following from afar your favorite team, and your favorite team’s pursuit of their favorite new forward, and don’t mind all the forward and backward EST to PST time zone tomfoolery like:

  • Watching “night games” in the afternoon and “weekend matinees” in the wee hours of the morning
  • Avoiding all forms of social media because you’ve DVR’ed (not to be confused with JvR’ed) the game and don’t want it spoiled while you’re still at work
  • Being the first or last to know something fun/cool/speculative/breaking when it comes to important calendar dates like The Draft or Trade Deadline or…

FREE AGENCY.

That’s right. There’s nothing like being a West Coast Bruins fan, and also self-proclaimed tweeter-twitterer-twit (that last one is probably the most accurate), on and around July 1st. Without fail, you spend a consistent portion of your way-too-invested-for-not-being-on-the-team-payroll time wondering who’s staying and who’s leaving; will this big free agent sign or that big free agent choose elsewhere; when should “the feed” be refreshed–now or later?

Tweets like this get you fired up beyond belief when you wake up bright & early in Los Angeles only to realize it’s lunchtime where the news broke in Oh, Canada.

You now think you’re not only “B”ehind on all the hockey happenings, but you have to play catch up as quickly as possible! So you put a plan in place for the eve of free agency and tell yourself to be like Steven Tyler singing on the eve of Armageddon — you don’t want to miss a thing.

Yet, somehow, someway, you do:

Wait a second?! It’s still June 30th where you live and you stayed up ’til practically midnight waiting for news to drop on your B’s getting that player from the Islanders, not this player!

So you convince yourself to just go to bed because how much is really going to happen between 3am and 9am EST or as your fancier-than-necessary alarm clock will translate that to: midnight to 6am PST. Right?

Wrong:

You gotta be kidding me! How are you so far out of the loop, you repeat to yourself.  And what’s with all the updates on the Bruins signing every Islander BUT the guy that you want. Even the New England Sports Network, the station you pay extra for just to watch out here on the left coast, is trolling you it feels like. Oh, and speaking of Network, you now begin to go all Howard Beale:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUY05_ZwFzg]

That’s right! You’re not not going to take this anymore. Oops. MOORE!

Like the tagline for Jaws 2 (a timely Sharks reference that has nothing to do with San Jose), just when you thought it was safe to go back in the proverbial water aka frozen pond, you realize there’s just no way to keep up with everything that’s happening “in the future” back home. It’s the way it is out here in laid back laissez faire LaLa Land and that’s OK with you. You’ll miss out on some things, but only a few.

SEVEN!? A few is not seven. Old Espo… he was seven. But certainly not a “few.” By the beard of Brent Burns (now a fitting San Jose reference), how did you sleep/nap/scroll past all of this?

And that’s when you realize perhaps it’s more exciting to not be “in the know” all the time and “at a distance” from your hometown team. That’s when you realize it’s actually quite fun to be a fan from afar while the puck professionals pound the pavement back in Boston. That’s when you realize you may feel, at times, all alone on an island but it’s much, much better than being all alone on this island:

LEAF it all behind, that’s all you can say after missing out on so much this free agency period. Thankfully, you’re heading into July still feeling good about your favorite team and perhaps a new favorite forward:

EST… PST… no matter the time(zone), there’s always something BRUIN this time of year, especially for frenetic faraway fans like you!