More Than Game 7

The Palliative Lens

by Andrew Esch

There is something about hockey that never really leaves you.

You can go years without lacing up skates.

• You can move away.

• Get older.

• Become a physician.

• Raise kids.

• Lose people you love.

• Carry responsibilities that the teenage version of yourself could never have imagined.

And then suddenly it is Game 7 in Buffalo. And somehow all of it comes roaring back.

This playoff season has felt bigger to me than hockey.

• Bigger than the Buffalo Sabres finally making a run again.

• Bigger than nostalgia.

• Bigger than sports radio arguments or old highlights or memories of Dominik Hasek or Ryan Miller, standing on their heads in April.

What surprised me most is how this season has reconnected me with people scattered all over the country, people from completely different eras of my life who otherwise may have stayed frozen in memory.

• Guys I grew up with.

• Old Neighbors, new neighbors

• People who knew me during my first marriage.

• Friends from medical school.

• Old teammates from beer league.

People I have not spoken to in years suddenly texting the day of game or during intermission like no time has passed at all. A simple:

• “Can you believe they called that?”

• “Did you see that goal?”

• “Who do you start in net tonight?”

And suddenly you are sixteen again.

Hockey does that in a way few things can.

Maybe it is because the sport itself asks something different of you. There is vulnerability in hockey. There is suffering in it.

• Exhaustion.

• Ritual.

• Shared misery.

• Shared joy.

You spend entire winters together chasing something that almost always ends in disappointment. And yet you keep coming back.

Anyone who has ever stepped onto a fresh sheet of ice understands this instantly.

That moment:

• The cold air hitting your face.

• The smell of the rink.

• The sound of blades cutting untouched ice.

• The strange combination of adrenaline and calm.

  
  

A fresh sheet always felt like possibility.

You could have had the worst week of your life outside the rink, but for the next hour nothing existed except the game and the people beside you.

But the older I get, the more I realize hockey was never just about the players on the ice.

It was about our parents too.

• The rides to practices at impossible hours.

• The freezing cold rinks.

• The money they probably did not have.

• The weekends surrendered.

• The equipment.

• The hotels.

• The exhaustion.

• The commitment.

Entire childhoods built quietly on parental sacrifice.

And now many of us watching this playoff run are at the age where one or both of our parents are gone. That changes sports too. Because eventually the game stops being only about the team and starts becoming tied to the people you watched it with.

And tonight I find myself thinking as much about my dad as I do the Sabres.

How much I wish I could watch this game with him.  How much I miss those conversations that seemed ordinary at the time but now feel irreplaceable. Sitting in the same room:

• Half watching.

• Half talking.

• Complaining about coaching decisions.

• Deep exhales during commercials.

• Pretending not to care as much as we actually did.

You never realize in the moment that these things become part of the architecture of grief later.  Hockey became memory storage. And maybe that is why this season has affected me so deeply. Because underneath all the excitement is something else entirely: recognition of time passing.

• The people we used to be.

• The people who helped raise us.

• The people missing now.

• The friendships that somehow survived decades of distance and adulthood.

Hockey has a way of reconnecting all of it.

And honestly, I think about that a lot in palliative care.

Because one of the things serious illness strips away is artificiality.

During serious illness, people rarely talk about résumés. They do not talk much about titles or awards or curated versions of themselves. They talk about experiences that made them feel alive.

• Teams.

• Summers.

• Music.

• Friends.

• Parents.

• The people who knew them before the world hardened them.

They talk about belonging.

That is what hockey gave many of us.

Belonging.

A shared identity connected not just to a sport, but to a city. A mentality. Buffalo people recognize each other everywhere. Especially during moments like this. You realize how many of us left physically but never emotionally. The city stays embedded in you somehow.

Especially if you grew up in rinks.

And tonight, before Game 7, thousands and thousands of people spread across the country will all feel connected to the exact same thing at the exact same moment.

• Former teammates.

• Physicians.

• Construction workers.

• Lawyers.

• Fathers.

• Sons.

• Widowers.

• Grandfathers.

• People grieving.

• People thriving.

• People struggling quietly.

• People remembering who they used to be.

All watching the same game. All briefly home again.

In medicine, especially in palliative care, I spend much of my life sitting with people during isolation.

• Illness isolates people.

• Aging isolates people.

• Caregiving isolates people.

• Grief isolates people.

Human beings are desperate for connection, memory, tribe, and meaning.

Sometimes hockey provides all four.

Which is why tonight probably is not really about whether the Sabres win or lose.

It is about what the season already gave back.

• Old friendships.

• Shared memories.

• A reconnection to younger versions of ourselves.

• A reminder that some bonds survive distance, time, grief, careers, aging, and silence.

And honestly, that feels important right now.

Maybe that is what a fresh sheet of ice always represented all along.

Not escape.

Renewal.