Final Thoughts on 2010-11 NHL Season: I liked Boston more when its teams sucked

In 1986, the Boston Celtics won their third and final NBA Championship of that decade. It was the same year I was only becoming introduced to professional sports on television, but it would still be a couple more years before I really began following basketball. Instead, the city of Boston, to me, became synonymous with suffering in 1986 for two different sports. After all, maybe you recall what happened to the city's football team earlier on or their beloved Red Sox later on in the same year of that Celtics title I just mentioned. You couldn't help but feel sorry for entire city, and it's little wonder that such embarrassment cemented Beantown's place as a home for sports tragedy in my mind. (If that word choice seems inappropriate to any reader, I might remind you of what else occurred that year. [NOTE: It only dawned on me the day after posting this that the date of this posting was in fact the 25th anniversary])

Fast-forward a decade-and-a-half, and a new century has truly ushered in a remarkably different fortune for Boston. While last year's Stanley Cup for the Blackhawks marked the last championship necessary to allow me to say I've seen all four of my favorite teams reach the tops of their respective mountains, those titles were spread out over the course of a quarter-century. And now in a matter of a decade, "The Cradle of Liberty" has accumulated three Super Bowl victories, two World Series titles, an NBA Championship, and this year, finally, a Stanley Cup. I was fully aware of this entering the final round of this year's NHL postseason, which perhaps factored into me picking against the Bruins each and every single round (you know, in addition to being among the others who were doubting Tim Thomas, and also remembering that picking against Boston has treated me well the past couple years).

But there's little other reason for me to be bitter. After all, every Blackhawks fan can find some satisfaction in knowing that a perennial rival has once again suffered a devastating loss—further worsened by the worldwide embarrassment of that city's hooligans looting and pillaging. To Vancouver's credit, the better residents promptly sought to make things right.

Hockey brings out some passionate and visceral emotions from the fans who hold the sport closest, so it's indeed very possible that this year's victory might be sweeter to many Boston residents than any of those other championships earned thus far in this 21st century. Or it might just be further fuel for Massachusetts' ever-growing number of douchebags. Either way, what's done is done, and in many ways, this is one year I'm going to want to forget.

Final Thoughts on 2010-11 NBA Season: Where the best TEAM won

This past basketball season essentially began nearly one year ago, right around July 8 of last year. Perhaps you recall what happened that evening and presumably helped the NBA garner terrific television ratings throughout the entire season. The Miami Heat became Public Enemy No. 1, which is probably why their loss in this year's NBA Finals has ended up feeling like a victory for every one of us who is no fan of theirs. The celebratory, mocking memes were cranked out in a hurry. An Associated Press headline rubbed it in—although apparently not from this Miami newspaper. I even offered my own dig.

In the end, however, the credit really must be given to the team that ended up hoisting that trophy last night, a Dallas Mavericks team that had been continually underestimated and written off all year long. The boys from South Beach didn't give the series away so much as the veteran Mavs went out and took it.

I suppose once every great while we get this sort of encouraging result in the NBA where the lower-profile, close-knit group of underdogs ends up knocking off the talent-laden predominant favorite. But enough about that Lakers team and the embarrassment they suffered. Like I said, this year deserves to be remembered primarily as Dallas' accomplishment.

The Arrival: In which just getting here was an adventure

After ™ last flew up to Illinois to spend a long weekend with me between her birthday and my own, I reminded her at the airport that the following three weeks until I saw her again would go by pretty fast. I had been saying it primarily to comfort her that unlike, say, the more than two months before that visit when we'd last been able to see one another, this final step was going to arrive much faster. And sure enough, before I knew it—before I'd even remembered to formally change my address, before I'd been able to land a job to start when I arrived, before I'd finished packing ALL of my belongings—I was at O'Hare on May 18 boarding a one-way flight to Texas.

We first moved ™'s stuff from the Houston area to our new apartment in Austin, and then the following day began the roughly 19-hour drive back to St. Charles. While the original plan was to drive as much as we could on the first day and find a hotel when we got tired, we instead ended up stopping for a bite to eat in Memphis that evening and just staying on the road until we arrived at my parents' house early that Saturday morning. After catching some shuteye, we had some rather lackluster Pizza Hut for dinner that evening with my parents and my aunt and uncle. Later that night, we went out with a couple friends of mine in downtown St. Charles.

Over the course of those three weeks between ™'s visits, I kept waiting for the moment that the relocation was really going to hit me. But even as I reminded myself that certain visits I was making could be my last for quite some time, it still didn't seem real.

What stuck with me that last night in St. Charles had to be a moment outside one of the bars just after last call. ™ was hugging me and a girl I'd never met before but was was apparently a friend of one of my friends looked at us and wondered aloud to us why she couldn't have something like ™ and I had. The girl, probably somewhere in her mid-twenties, had just gotten out of a long-distance relationship.

When other friends and co-workers used words like "jealous" or such in response to learning my relocation plans, I had sort of downplayed it as them just being nice. But on that last night, something in that one girl's eyes finally made me feel lucky. After three or so years of convincing myself nobody else in their right mind would ever want to be in my shoes, I finally experienced a real moment of having somebody else saying they wanted what I had.

Ultimately, I was only beginning to realize how lucky I was.

Final Thoughts on 2010-11 Chicago Bulls: One trophy short

As this year's Bulls team accumulated honor after honor—Tom Thibodeau being named Coach of the Year, Derrick Rose awarded Most Valuable Player, and then Gar Forman having to share Executive of the Year honors with Miami's Pat Riley because (just as I had joked in an earlier BMC piece) three other league honchos apparently forgot that John Paxon slipped out of the role two years ago and voted for the team's executive vice president of basketball operations instead (NOTE TO NBA: You might want to fix the way you determine that)—following a regular season in which the team won more games than any other team in the league, I routinely said, "It won't mean a thing without a ring" (and, yes, somebody else came up with that line).

But truth be told, when I think back to what my own expectations were for this team at the beginning of the year, it's hard to be bitter—even if the season did end at the hands of the much-maligned Miami Heat. Oh sure, I had originally predicted Chicago would be ousted by that same South Beach squad in five games a round earlier, but that was back before the Bulls achieved far more than most any fan dared dream this season. And looking back at how the team only seemed to get better and better with each passing quarterly update this season, I myself had indeed sipped so frequently from the Kool-Aid that I was already beginning to apologize to my girlfriend for what I thought would happen to her Dallas Mavericks if they met Chicago in the Finals.

Instead, I find myself rooting alongside her for the one team remaining that stands in between the Heat and a championship. After all, it helps take my mind off the work that will need to be done in order to help these Bulls play into June next year—assuming there's a 2011-12 season, of course.

NHL Stanley Cup Final Predicitions: A drought's about to end

In just a couple weeks, one of those video game depictions is going to come true and a long-suffering franchise will finally be raising Lord Stanley's Cup. This is the first Bruins team to even reach the Finals in more than two decades, and it's been almost 40 years since the team's last championship in 1972. But at least Beantown's tasted victory before, unlike Vancouver, where the team has never been declared champions ever since entering the league in 1970.

So once again, we'll presumably be presented with some rather spirited and raucous crowds in both cities as these two supposedly long-suffering (last year's beloved Blackhawks had a nearly half-century wait between Cups) franchises compete for one last series win.

The big winner in this, of course, would have to be the NHL. Considering that the alternatives last round included the markets of San Jose and Tampa Bay, the ratings could have been a lot scarier. Instead, an appearance from the Canucks is surely the best shot a Canadian team's had at the Cup in quite some time, and most anything involving Boston is almost always good for television.