When did sports transport you ... or crush you?

Just crushing ...

1989 Stanley Cup Finals. Calgary beat Montreal. I didn't speak to anyone for three days, I was so pissed.

1990, the Pittsburgh Penguins' final regular-season game, and a playoff berth was pretty much riding on a Pens win over Buffalo, and Mario Lemieux came back after missing more than a month with back problems. It was just too perfect to be true.
Now correct me if I'm wrong but I believe the game went to overtime, and Uwe Krupp scored the game-winner. You could hear a pin drop in the Civic Arena. I went to bed super-bitter that night.

 

Crush:

I was 7 or 8 and was taking judo in a safe little town when the guy who ran the place decided we needed to get tougher. So he invited a school from a gritty, faded industrial city in the next county to visit and these kids just whaled on us. I'm not sure it was even judo. I remember getting kicked in the face a few times, feeling helpless as a rabbit against an alligator. All of us just got the snot knocked out of us.

Transport
1970 Knicks, Willis Reed.

 

Crushed was game six of the 2000 Stanley Cup finals for me (fuck you, Arnott!).

But the numbest I've ever been after attending a game has to be Game 1 of the 2003 NHL Conference semis. 5OTs between Dallas and Anahiem with a GWG waived off in OT for each team, and Petr Fucking Sykora wins it like 2 minutes into the fifth OT.

As a Stars fan, to go that long and get that invested with no emotional payoff what to speak off, it was just numbing. All of a sudden the game is over and you have no reason to celebrate, but it's jut game 1 so you can't be crushed.

Quietest walk back to the car I've ever been a part of.

 

A transported moment: I was at a Syracuse-UConn basketball dome in the Carrier Dome when Voskuhl was at UConn. The place was packed with 35,000 people, a few thousand actually sitting behind the curtain but at an angle they could still see the court. It was a back and forth game, well-played. Then with the crowd completely into the game the whole time, up and down with every basket, Syracuse just pulls away. Dunks, 3-pointers, crazy jumpers to just crush UConn. Crowd goes fuckin' nuts. Students rush the court, destroy a basket, send Dicky V and Mike Tirico running. It was madness.

I hate people, but I love being at a game with a huge crowd. Nothing like tens of thousands of people going apeshit, in a good way, for the same reason.

 

Transport: Seeing NHL hockey at age 6 for the first time -- Kings hosting North Stars in 1975 at the Forum. Loved the game ever since. Also in the mix, seeing Nolan Ryan pitch for the Angels in the late 1970s; and later, see him take a no-hitter into the seventh inning of a game when he was with Texas and was facing the Angels.

Crushed: Vikings lose to the Falcons in the NFC title game; Vikings lose to the Cardinals on that last play of the game (I was in attendance), New Jersey Devils, the former Colorado Rockies, lose to the Avs in Game 7 of the Cup finals in Denver.

 

McCown passes to the end zone! CAUGHT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! TOUCHDOWN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

(Pause, with only crowd audible . . . )

No!!!!!!!!!!!! NNNNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Please, someone post that Madden recap of this.

 

Lane Kiffin: I'm buying tickets for my wife and our two children in the Black Hole.

 

I am well aware I'm in a glass house here. When you know you have no hope whatsoever, it's sort of liberating. What really sucks is I'm thinking "Gee, Kiffin isn't as bad as the last two or three coaches."

 

Of course Kiffin is better, he's still 0-0

 

(hi Rosie! )

 

http://cctvimedia.clearchannel.com/kfan/gm%20winning%20td.mp3

 

Heh.

But see, that's the thing. The Sabres fans could go through mad/upset/horrified and all those wonderful emotions cause the series was over (assuming we're talking about 1999 here).

Because it was game 1 of the series, there was no point in getting too down about it because it's just one game. If you won you could celebrate the win and how hard it was to achieve. But with the loss there was no point in dwelling too much. So it was seven hours of anticipation with no payoff either way at the end. Hence the numbing thing.

But I would like to thank EverySabresFan for my transporting sports moment.