Well, the Bruins just got eliminated from the Stanley Cup Playoffs. I know it's sad. I am a big hockey fan and while I do live in Boston, my hometown team will always have my heart - and they have a long and proud history of tanking it in the playoffs. So even if the Bruins weren't my #2 team and I wasn't bummed about the loss on its own merits, I would still fully understand the feeling around town today. You're sad about the loss, and more, you're at a loss now that your favorite sport has been pulled out from under you. Sure, you might keep following the rest of the playoffs, but it's just not as good. Right?
Allow me to offer a possible solution to your pains. One sport is now over (or the best part is over, anyway), but another one is just getting started. Of course I'm talking about competitive air guitar. Not only does it give you a chance to cheer for someone else from Boston trying to beat everyone else in the land (or even the world), but the season is very much like a playoffs since all the competitions "count" - there's no equivalent to regular-season games where you win some, you lose some, you compete against the same people repeatedly, and you get ranked according to how well you did over a long period of time. It's just Game 7 all the time.
The structure is this: local Qualifiers (Boston's is on May 24th at TT's, more info here), where the top 3 air guitarists go on to a Semi-Final - ours is in NYC on July 1 - and the rest go home and cry themselves to sleep. The Semi-Final draws in the top 3 from several Qualifiers, and the top 3 at Semis go on to Nationals in Kansas City on August 9th (#KCnationals2014! The hashtag worked! Maybe.), where the winner goes to the World Championships in Finland. At every stage, you can be eliminated. Yes, there is the Dark Horse competition where air guitarists who impressed the judges in their respective Qualifier or Semifinal but didn't make the top 3 can be invited for what essentially amounts to a rematch - and the top 3-5 of them get to compete in the National Final, but you can't count on a Dark Horse invite, and even then you're up against "the best of the rest" from the entire country.
But more to the point, it gives you something to cheer about and to get really worked up over. Like any sport, you can watch it in a bar surrounded by friends. Like any sport, you'll have your favorites you want to win and "go all the way," and like any sport, each "player" has their own strengths and weaknesses. And it handily wraps up at the end of the summer. But it is really different from hockey or any other pro sport in one important way. If you're a huge hockey fan and wish you could play, you can either go back in time and start playing as a toddler and kick ass all the way up through junior hockey and college hockey and maybe get drafted by an NHL team, or you can say "oh well" and toss that dream out the window like so many others before it. If you realize that you love air guitar and you want to give it a shot yourself? YOU CAN! In fact, you are encouraged to do so! You can even sign up as a walk-on on the day of the competition (just walk up to Captain Airhab and declare your intentions), which in hockey would be the equivalent of, what, strolling into the locker room and casually throwing on a jersey?
So take the next week to grieve about the Bruins' loss, and then when you're feeling a little better, come see me and your new hometown team do our best for your entertainment at TT's on the 24th.
(Or if your preferred coping mechanism is to drink heavily and make impulsive decisions, one of those impulsive decisions should be to...
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