yuerstruly

aka. Year One with the San Jose Sharks and the Consequences of a Heated Rivalry Hyperfixation Snowballing into NHL RPF Brain

aka. My Hockey Origins and How It's Driven Every Reverse Pipeline the Past Month and a Half

it's very hard to get into my hockey story without talking about my basketball story, which is very important!! so i'll start there. i want to preface that i am from the bay!! but i went to a high school where every single guy had a hate boner for our home teams (why do you hate the warriors?? why do you want the SEAHAWKS to win against the 49ers??). i had a crush on a guy who liked the boston celtics, so in attempts to secure some common ground that wasn't just 1) being chinese and 2) taking calculus, i started watching the celtics in 2018 (the other option was joining speech and debate, which was not an idea i was going to entertain). this crush of mine later faded into the background, but i continued watching the celtics. i caught every game i could, dragged my mom into watching it during dinners, and spammed my best friend 20-100 messages EVERY GAME. i was even deep in the reddit and in every game live thread i could possibly jump in on. i was probably catching every single season consistently until 2024. i didn't watch them as much during the 24-25 season, but it wasn't because i was no longer interested. after all, they were the 23-24 season champions, and they hadn't made drastic roster changes!! i was, however, going through some of my darkest times overseas during that season until april, and by the time i came back to the states, we were reaching the tail end of the regular season. i was excited for the playoffs and looking forward to a back-to-back championship with the celtics, just to witness on TV in real time our star player jayson tatum go down with a non-contact achilles tear. and just like that, the celtics champsionships were shattered. fast forward to the beginning of the 25-26 season. i'm still watching them! why wouldn't i watch the celtics? i had no reason not to. a month in, i got bored. the lack of tatum was just one factor. half of the core that drove the championship run had gone to other teams, and i could only recognize 3-4 players on the roster. well, players come and go, so i shouldn't have complained. except, the first bit of the season was so agonozing, and i was pained by the fact that they were bottom 3 in the eastern conference. watching the celtics was no longer fun, and i wanted to watch something FUN!

enter the san jose sharks.

it turns out that i love to hear about my home sports teams more than i thought i would, including the bad roster changes of the san francisco giants. i'm in a discord server with a few friends and we have had a sports channel since oct 2023. it's a channel where we all yell in, and all of us watch different sports. kind of. there's overlap now. in any case, k was in there for hockey, and just like anyone else, was yelling into the void. the difference was that i started paying attention b/c she would post the sharks losing so horrendously that it was funny (losing to canucks 10-1 in 2023 and the broadcast showing a little boy holding up a sign saying that it was his first sharks game). prior to that, my only impression of the sharks was that they were good when i was a preteen. now, i did not start following the sharks because of that. i was not tuning into sharks games regularly. i probably watched a total of 3 games during the 23-24 season, and maybe 5 minutes or so of 2 others. i was still invested in the celtics and an avid f1 viewer, on top of having a horrendous senior year workload while burying myself in student org logistics. time for the sharks wasn't a priority, and i'm not sure i would've enjoyed that season in any capacity anyway. my 24-25 season absence from above also applies here.

now we're in the 25-26 season. i needed a change of pace from the celtics (who are, by the way, performing decently in the eastern conference now), so why not watch the sharks? that's basically it. my workload was honestly very chill, so i had a lot of free time for tuning into games. at first, i was just curious! i hadn't watched a hockey game in a year and a half, and wanted to try something different. this was around late october/early november. then i tuned into another game. and another. and i was frustrated that i could barely understand the game, so of course, the solution was to watch MORE (in hindsight, it's actually so stupid of me to try comparing how well i could read hockey to how well i could read basketball when i've been watching basketball consistently for 7 years). and then, well, i was catching nearly every sharks game. i was crazy enough to be tuning into the radio at restaurants while waiting in line, and my friend went, "what are you, a man?" but it's funny because i kind of willmack-baited her into it a month later, and we went to the game against the tampa bay lightning while we were back home!! fun experience, more about it detailed here. i don't know if i'll be catching as many games for the remainder of the season because my courseload has ramped up, but i am fully aboard and not getting off anytime soon.

my hockey viewing was greatly supplemented by k feeding willmack lore of course <3 i won't get into it too much because if i think too hard about them, i get overwhelmed. i'm actually procrastinating on getting to the ao3 tag b/c i have picky reader syndrome and i'm not really in the right headspace for sifting through a tag rife with AI-generated "fics" at this point in my life.

around a week or so after the game against the pittsburgh penguins, i tuned into a devils game. namely, jack's return after his chicago dinner freak accident where he scored the only goal in a devils loss at home where TATE MCRAE WAS IN THE AUDIENCE. and that was my Real introduction to jack hughes. that led to me tuning into another devils game, then another, and i spent a week just watching videos of jack hughes on youtube, and by extension, hughes brothers content. this ranged from jack sassing reporters to promo they were doing together to compilations of them falling on the ice, even videos of devils pre-game sewer ball. now i'm completely enamored by jack's deadpan voice and his hockey iq/knowledge, which would lead me to his ao3 tag. top ship: Nico Hischier/Jack Hughes (b. 2001). who is nico hischier?? i didn't know, but i clicked on a fic anyway. got hooked and going into a tag smaller than willmack but still with a sufficient amount of fics was a great way for me to procrastinate. i ended up accumulating 30+ fics i need to comment on, and now i love nico and nicojack. i'm also miserable watching the devils play, but i still torment myself by tuning into nearly every game.

the last bit of jack hughes fascination was checking out tate mcrae's music, which, well, is such a weird pipeline, but when i tell the following—getting into f1 through an nct fic, getting into the nba b/c of a hs crush, discovering ludovico einaudi because of a random korean youtube channel that did nct videos—getting into tate mcrae post jack hughes discovery sounds normie in comparison. in any case, tate mcrae does have some music i like, and i have, um, logged 1.4k scrobbles in the 3 weeks i have listened to her, which is more than the amount of scrobbles i have logged for any artist in the year of 2025. CRAZY!!

while all of this was happening, there was the heated rivalry aspect of it all. it was not a show i had ever intended on watching. i'm just not a show watcher! never really watched shows in english past middle school, and the only one i've touched is gossip girl, which is something i have on while i cook. daph, who already watched it the first two episdoes, was telling me about it, though i don't remember what the details of that conversation looked like. i do know, however, that if i wasn't into hockey in any capacity, i would not have tuned into this show, even though i know the show doesn't have that much hockey. i tuned in with the intent of being able to discuss the first 2 episodes before i met with her the first week of december, and i have to be frank, 70% of my motivation was me wanting to make my then-crush squirm in the car while daph and i talked about gay sex during the drive. i don't know if it worked because his ability to process english seems to leave him as soon as he steps outside academia, and he thought the word for "orgasm" was "organism." looking back, the first 2 episodes weren't as gripping, but they were very much so then. i wanted more hollanov! i didn't watch the scott hunter episode until a week later despite it having come out, and watched it with episode 4 after a friend and i had finished writing our final report. we were treating episode 4 as our "reward." i know many are binge watchers, but i loved the buildup and anticipation for each episode. i had so much fun waiting a week, and being able to discuss in detail how each episode made me feel. i even ended my year reading the hollanov-focused books, which was an experience full of mixed emotions. i'm not sure i loved how they made me feel, but it pulled me out of my reading slump.

my heated rivalry feelings have changed a lot since then. i was very excited to write fic for them, wanting to explore themes and more real hockey, but the intensity of my feelings have faded since. in fact, every time i try to sit down to write this post (which i have been trying to work on since late december and was simply meant to be a "haha i got into the sharks a month before i got into heated rivalry, look where i am now" post), both how much i want to cover in this post to fully encapsulate my experience and how i feel about the show changes. i seem to like it less and less, especially with the weird crossovers happening in the nhl, and how it's continuing to drive misogyny and homophobia in fandom spaces. there's also a large part of the fandom that just feels casually racist, and they aren't willing to admit they're wrong about professional hockey. in a way, it feels very white because they can't seem to grasp intersectionality in any capacity, and it is so frustrating as a closeted queer asian american.

anyway, this is all to say, i'm fully invested in hockey now, thanks to all the things happening around me, for better or for worse. it's hard to call this a "happy" experience, but i like where i am now. and i'm adding another thing to my list of things i can talk about to make myself sound like a normie!! so, i'll take it as a partial win.