Читать книгу Hope and Heartbreak in Toronto. Life as a Maple Leafs Fan онлайн

50 страница из 85

For me, it was a perfect time to be leaving. Travelling in those days meant leaving behind many habits — mine centred on the fate of the Leafs. The Internet was only in its infancy and live streaming and other online technological advances that could have made it possible to track events back home were still well off.

It had been a good run for the Leafs for a while, with two conference final appearances and four straight playoff showings. But obsessing over how they were going to stem the inevitable decline was getting a bit tedious as I was finishing up my university studies. A few weeks in New Zealand and then in Australia was all it took for me to forget about the Leafs and the various machinations that were taking place back home. I was quickly realizing that the world through the bottom of a pint glass and my reflection in it looked pretty much the same in both New Zealand and Australia as it did in Toronto.

Wanting a bit of a different experience, I flew from Australia to Thailand in the second week of June. I hadn’t gone completely cold turkey, though — I had managed to gather very fragmentary information before leaving that the Detroit Red Wings had a 3–0 stranglehold on the Stanley Cup Final over the Philadelphia Flyers. To that point, North American sports wasn’t really shown much in the Southern Hemisphere, but I would soon find out that games were, oddly perhaps, widely available in Asia. I arrived in Bangkok between Game 3 and Game 4 and had made the rookie traveller’s mistake of miscalculating the time difference by a few hours while trying to pin down when Game 4 would be showing.