dira | feeling the squee

Last night, I was sitting in my usual chair with my laptop,

iuliamentis a few feet away at her computer, when I made one of those incoherent high-pitched noises of helpless delight that generally signal fannishness in action. Iulia asked me what I was reading, and I waved vaguely at the screen and said, "nhl.com has an article about Stevie!"

It was a pretty standard profile of Steve Yzerman: captain of the Red Wings since the tender age of twenty-one, the longest serving captain in the NHL, he lead the Wings to the Stanley Cup in 2002 "on one leg," and then had radical knee surgery in the off-season; his doctors hoped that he would be able to walk without pain, and instead he returned to the NHL last spring and played sixteen games with his team. Through those sixteen games, through the off-season, through training camp, he struggled, wondering if he was going to have to retire, but since the start of this season he's not just leading the team with those intangibles that we all clung so desperately to when we weren't sure he'd ever score twenty goals in a season or play more than ten minutes a game - he's got ten goals in twenty-five games, he's playing over seventeen minutes a night. He's come back. He's still great. He's a hockey hero.

I'm not sure why it gave me such warm fuzzies, except that I am a total hockey fangirl, and I guess that's enough.

Stevieeeeee!