The Narrative Genius of 'Heated Rivalry'

I don’t like hockey. I grew up in Pittsburgh in the 1980s and 1990s, when the Pittsburgh Penguins were building their dynasty. It was arguably one of the greatest places and times to be alive as a hockey fan in the United States. The thing that hockey fans tell you if you tell them you don’t like hockey is that you can’t watch it on TV. The unique genius of the sport does not translate to the small screen. While basketball’s speed, muscle, and craft; football’s strategic gamesmanship and sudden violence; and baseball’s pastoral beauty are all apparent on television broadcasts, hockey looks like a bunch of faceless cubes gliding around chasing an object that’s only intermittently visible to the audience. For all that close-quarters slicing and grinding, you’d think they’d score more.