Today's a little bittersweet over here, folks. This is going to be the last Miracle Monday. :( It pains me greatly to bring this series to an end, but coming up with post topics has become incredibly difficult and I don't want to beat a dead horse. And it feels right to conclude on the one year mark. That's right, this is week 52 (how. on. earth?), and I've thoroughly enjoyed every single one of them!
But after all this time, I'm still left with the question that I feel like people think at me all the time: "What is it about this? Why do you care so much?"
I touched on this really quick back in my first Miracle Monday post, but it bears repeating all these months later.
I didn't really "discover" the Miracle on Ice until late 2012, when I was halfway through my senior year of college. That was when I not only learned more about the players themselves, but I learned their average age: 21 years and 9 months. At the time, I myself was 21 years and 10 months old. When I first saw Miracle back in 2004, though I knew this was technically a young team, they were so much older than me! They had always been older than me, until very suddenly they weren't.
Suddenly they were my friends who ate too much fried food and not enough vegetables, who I had to mother and stop from making incredibly reckless decisions, who drove me places when I didn't have a car and carried my groceries for me and were always absolute sweethearts. They were my younger brother and cousins, who belch and make fart jokes and talk in weird accents just for fun, who can't cook much more than a grilled cheese sandwich and never clean their rooms, who love their grandma and snuggle their dog and color with their little cousins.
That made it so real to me. They were just... people. They were college students. And as a college student trying to juggle classes and a job and an internship and writing a thesis and worrying about getting a job after graduation and wondering how the hell this is all supposed to work... it was incredibly meaningful to me that these guys who were as fake-adult as I was did something so next-level amazing. It made their accomplishment simultaneously all the more mind-boggling and all the more tangible. They were good at what they did and worked really hard and had a lot of faith in the unknown. I may not've played a single second of hockey in my life, but you don't need to be a hockey player to find that inspirational. It's cool that I can see my own traits in some of them; relating so strongly to someone who was able to achieve so much success makes it easier to soldier on when you feel like a failure. (Hey, I'm in my mid-20s. It happens.)
Also? They were a bunch of huge dorks.
So graceful.
And, y'know, they looked like children.
Excuse me, are you 12?
If those little boys right there can win an Olympic gold medal, I'm pretty sure I can handle the regular-person stuff happening in my life. :)
And on that note, I think it's time to wrap things up. Thanks so much for hanging out with me every Monday. I'm so appreciative of everyone who's commented, tweeted, messaged or otherwise given me feedback over the course of this past year! This probably won't be the end forever -- I'm sure I'll pop back in with the occasional Miracle on Ice post in the future, because... well, it's me. But in the meantime, if you're ever looking to chat about 1980 hockey, you know where to find me!
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