I should have known it was a sign. Working at a gas station, listening to game 6 on the radio, I should have known.
At the very moment Bryan Bickell tied up the game late in the third period, I was starting to print out my nightly lottery reports, when the terminal jammed up. It'd had issues earlier in my shift, before the game started, but this sounded different. Whatever, I've still got some stuff manually written down, so I can get some of my paperwork done. I get back to closing up shop. First order of business, I can't get this damn machine unjammed. I mean I get the spool of paper out of there, but I can't get it to feed back through.
I guess I consider myself sometimes optimistic, to the point of naiveté. "Tie game," I thought. "It's cool, we'll pull it out in overtime. I'll actually get to watch it at home after I finish closing."
The thing most people don't know about a Massachusetts Lottery terminal is that if you try to re-load the paper roll enough times, it ends up shutting down and rebooting. Which it did right as the winning goal was scored by Dave Bolland.
This whole season has been the teams I follow coming up just short. Back in March, Williams College lost the NESCAC conference final (and an NCAA D3 tournament birth) 2-1 to Bowdoin. My friends and I were already preparing for a road trip to Lake Placid to see them in the finals, if they'd made it through the tournament.
Early in the AHL season, I began dating a girl whose cousin works for the Syracuse Crunch. I've been an Albany fan since I was little, but because of constant trips out to Syracuse, free tickets from her cousin, and Albany's sheer futility in the past 5 seasons, I latched onto the Crunch. Bought a scarf. Robbed an Alex Picard gamer from my girlfriend's closet to wear to games. We even went to see them play Springfield in the playoffs a few weeks ago. They reached the Calder Cup Finals, and lost to Grand Rapids in 6 games.
And now this. I'm glad I had a distraction, though. I remember the end of the 2011-12 EPL season, when Manchester City squeaked out a last second goal against a QPR team that had put up a fight, to win the title. As a Manchester United supporter, I saw the title being ripped from my team's hands with mere seconds left on the clock. I was catatonic for the rest of the day. I just laid in bed. Maybe that helped prepare me for last night. I stood there for a few minutes, but got back to my work.
Don't get me wrong, though. This hockey season may have been a string of tough defeats for me, but I'm not letting it get me down. Between college and the AHL, I've been to way more games in the past 8 months than in the past two years combined. Dating a hockey fan (especially a Pens fan) is fun, just because I can tease her with Sidney Crosby jokes whenever we get mozzarella sticks at a pizza place. I've had more fun with the shortened NHL season than I did with any other season, besides the Bruins winning the Cup in 2011.
I left my paperwork unfinished, and scrawled out a note for my boss in the morning, telling him I couldn't get the lottery terminal back up and running. He hasn't called yet, so I'm guessing he got it to work.