In January 2021, as the NHL season was beginning to start (it started late due to the novel coronavirus), I decided to pick a favorite hockey team. By birthright, I was a Blackhawks fan, but as a teenager I’d hopped on that bandwagon later than the rest of McHenry County. It never felt genuine.
My rules were these: First, I didn’t want the team to be American. Not so much because hockey is Canada’s game, but because I had preexisting thoughts and feelings about every American city. Second, I wanted the team to be as irrelevant as possible. Not relevantly bad, but certainly not relevantly good. Part of this was wanting to be the first one on the bandwagon. More of it was wanting to align my rooting interests with my lifestyle as an NIT blogger, the NIT being an American college basketball tournament a lot of people don’t care about at all.
I told my friend Ben this over the phone a few nights before I was set to make the choice. He told me he’d worked in his company’s Vancouver office for a week back in 2018. “There were a few Leafs fans. Lots of Canucks fans, of course. One guy from Edmonton who liked the Oilers. We even had a dude from Ottawa who followed the Senators.”
The Ottawa Senators.
Perfect.
I had forgotten they existed.
It’s been a fun five seasons of hockey. Torturous for my fellow Sens fans, but not torturous for me. I have no baggage here. It’s involved a lot of ESPN+, a lot of learning about Ottawa and Gatineau and Kanata, and a lot of inexplicable organizational miscues. It’s been a hilarious five years to be a Sens fan, and although I’ve made no sacrifice whatsoever in the process, tonight it all pays off. Tonight, the Ottawa Senators play their first playoff game in eight years, and they play it against the Toronto Maple Leafs in a good old-fashioned Battle of Ontario.
If you want to know how much the Battle of Ontario means to Canada, you could always ask a Canadian. I’d advise against it, though. For one thing, there’s a temptation when you care about something to describe it inaccurately. Canadians care about Ontario. Also, you’re already here. Let this American who’s never attended an NHL game tell you what to know about the biggest series of the Stanley Cup Playoffs’ first round (eat shit, Avs and Stars—this is bigger):
Toronto is Canada’s largest, most important, most worldly city. The Leafs have won 13 Stanley Cups. No one cares that they’ve done this, because the last one they won came during the season John Lennon met Yoko Ono. The Beatles were still together and there were only six teams in the NHL. The Leafs are an embarrassment to Toronto and therefore Canada, and Canada wants it to stay that way. Picture the Yankees, but if halfway through their history the Yankees turned into the Jets.
Ottawa is a city Canadians only talk about when they’re referencing their government. Queen Victoria put the capital there in the 1800’s, hoping Canadians would feel such an absence of national pride that they’d give up on the notion of independence. The Senators exist. They play at an arena indirectly named after tires. It is 30 minutes outside of town.
Like the Leafs, most of the Sens’ accomplishments come from prehistoric times. If you really want to understand the significance of the Leafs’ 13 Cups, know this: The Senators have eleven, and the Senators did all of that before disbanding for 58 seasons after the summer of 1934. The first Ottawa Senators had won eleven Stanley Cups and disappeared for eight years before the Original Six even came into existence.
The modern Sens have long been pesky but toothless, an organization whose second-greatest glory is known as the Hamburglar Run. They’re goofy. They’re silly. They lost a first round draft pick because they forgot to tell the league one of their players had a contract with a no-trade clause. The Senators are the perfect foil for the Leafs. The Sens are usually bad and they should be. The Leafs are usually bad and they should not be bad at all. God created the Leafs and said, “Heh heh, this is funny.” Then he created the Senators to bother them even more.
These last few years (the ones I’ve gotten to enjoy following the Sens) seem to have been some of the silliest. Progress has always been on the table, but the Sens have rarely made it happen. Until this year. This year, it’s all come together. The Sens aren’t half-bad. And with American hero Brady Tkachuk leading the charge (unless he’s still hurt which doesn’t seem like the case but might be the case), they’re also very likable. Claude Giroux is a grizzled ginger vet. Jake Sanderson, an American like Tkachuk, is a stud on the blue line. Tim Stützle has grown from a little German boy into a little German man. We miss Josh Norris dearly, but we’ve come a long way since the children of Ottawa came over to throw their hats into Tkachuk and Norris and Stützle’s yard. It’s happening, and though the law of hockey says teams must knock on the door before they kick it down and grab the Cup, maybe our fellas will at least beat the Leafs. It’d sure be funny if our fellas beat the Leafs.
In my time as a hockey fan, the Sens are 12–12 against Toronto, with the funniest win a 6–5 comeback victory at Scotiabank Arena after trailing 5–1 in the second period. These last two seasons, the Sens have dominated the Leafs, winning six times and only losing once. The Sens are not the favorite in this series.
The Leafs won the Atlantic Division and will have home-ice advantage in Games 1, 2, 5, and 7 (provided the Senators let this go seven games). There are concerns that games in Ottawa will bring a heavy contingent of Leafs fans to the Canadian Tire Centre. I am not concerned. The more Leafs fans, the better. The best way to torture a Leafs fan is to make them watch the Leafs.
Again, though, the Sens aren’t supposed to win this. I want to make that abundantly clear. The point of the Battle of Ontario is not that it’s some heavyweight tilt. It’s that the Ottawa Senators exist to pester the Toronto Maple Leafs, to poke them just enough times to remind the world who the Leafs are. Pester away, boys. Playoff hockey is back in Ottawa.
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