Re: If your best players hadn't gone pro, would your team beat BC?
I think that people who are comfortable in their own skin don't need to go out and convince the world of how great they are. They can just be happily self-confident.
If you apply this to college hockey fandom, you can see who is confident and who is desperate.
I love the Wisconsin program's history. The players that have played here (wherever they're from). The titles won. The great seasons where a title wasn't won. The Coliseum. The Rumble Rink. The Water Bottle incident. Bucky on skates. Seeing Dirty in the front row of the student section being forced to do the Tequila march or be trampled. Etc, etc, etc...
I wouldn't trade my experiences as a fan for anyone else's.
I envy the recent success that BC has had, but I don't envy their program. I respect their program as a historical peer program to the one that I am a fan of. The same can be said for Denver, UND, Michigan, BU and yes, even the Gophers. We're the big boys and there's not a separate table for a
biggest boy.
There's no reason for a fan of these peer programs to envy any of the others. We're all the same, historically, regardless of when the most recent title(s) was(were) won. Ten years from now, the landscape could look much different than just the past 5 years. We each have a connection to the history of our own program, and they're historically great programs, so how could we want to be a fan of another or envy them? None of us do and to suggest otherwise is silly.
The flip side though is that while we shouldn't envy the other peer programs, you can see that the self-confident amongst us don't feel the need to shout from the tree-tops that we are the best - even when deep down we might feel that way. Sure, we say things like 6 > 5 (and in truth, it is
), but it's just fan talk to get a rise.
I don't expect that any Gopher fan should want to be a Badger fan just because we have more titles. That would discount their own personal history of growing up a Gopher fan. On the flip side, when a Gopher fan says that their program is the most specialist program ever and that we should all bow down because they use mostly home state kids, it assumes that I or anyone else places any importance in that. As Scooby likes to say - Nobody cares.
If it's a source of pride for you, great! Be quietly confident about it. Realize that it's cool (to you) and that others just don't get it. Feel the pride. But understand that for people who don't place any importance in it, it's meaningless. It's also arbitrary and can't be proven as an absolute. So one can't say that this
should be important to everyone else.
It's really pathetic when people are so desperate for validation from others. Especially when it's in regards to their favorite sports team, band, etc.
All that said, I can't imagine how St. Cloud fans can even leave their homes.
