Why Our Marriage Needed Hockey

My husband loves sports.  I believe I've mentioned it a time or two (or a hundred) here over the years.  He's not obsessed with it in that he paints his whole body and does ridiculous things to get on tv.  No, he doesn't do that, but he did get tears in his eyes when the Cardinals didn't win the Super Bowl a couple of years ago.  (Sorry, Babe, but you know it's true.)

Well, I know that most of y'all aren't from 'round here and so you could really care less about our local teams, but let me just tell ya that when any of our teams go to the play-offs in any sport, it's kinda a big deal around here. 

Over the past weekend, one of Paco's vendors gave him hockey play-off tickets for the Phoenix Coyotes.  I think he was so excited he could hardly sleep the night before.

And any man knows it's going to be a good date when he gets to wear a hockey jersey.  Period.  We could have gotten into a fight, car accident or forgotten our wallets at home and he still would have thought it was aweome, all because of the hockey jersey.

So there we were.  When I married my wonderful, understanding, handsome sports-loving hubby, I joined his world.  Which means I quietly asked his ear what "icing" meant or why everyone was booing.  If you know hockey fanatics at play-off games, you do not ask those questions out loud, lest you get jumped on the way back to your car. 

But even he was impressed when he saw the ref warming up like this:

Think he was showing off a bit?  Um, yeah.  Or maybe he just really, really, really likes to do the splits.  On ice.  On ice skates.  With thousands of fans watching him.  Yes, that makes way more sense.

While the night itself was pretty stinkin' fun - topped off with the fact that the Coyotes won (although by the end of the game, I was so tired I didn't care who scored in overtime) - the best part was when he leaned over to me, looked me in the eyes and said, "Thank you.  I love sharing this with you."

Aw.  Well, I had to pay him back somehow for falling in love with Downton Abbey with me.

Or maybe the best part was going through the DQ parking lot and then going home and eating sundaes in bed at midnight while watching The Office.

It's just too close to call.

What do you do to get into your husband's world?  It's easy enough to do, if we remember to make the effort to do it.