My Favorite Time of the Year

Is this the best time of the year?

Did you wonder what to do in the two-day void between the final games of the NHL's regular season and the opening round of the 2011 Stanley Cup playoffs? Did you watch NHL On The Fly on a continuous loop during those 48 hours?

Let me guess: You asked yourself the same thing I asked myself in that time - is it Wednesday yet? 

The time is almost here. 

The beauty of playoff hockey is this - we're predicting, prognosticating and even praying that maybe "this is the year" for your team. Or for my team. Or our team.

And there are storylines galore. 

If you've got any interest in the Tim Thomas Foundation and in the Tim Thomas Hockey Camps, it's easy to guess where your rooting interest rests - the Boston-Montreal series. It's one of the most storied NHL rivalries, and also one of its most dramatic, especially given the theatrics of this season - the melee during the Bruins' 8-6 win in February at TD Garden, or Zdeno Chara's hit on Max Pacioretty - and the NHL's response -  that ignited a firestorm of discussion, criticism, analysis and even a potential business boycott of the NHL. 

(Is this the NHL playoffs, or is this a soap opera? That's why we keep watching.) 

But the fact of the matter is that in at least four games and in at most seven, someone's going home. Someone moves on and someone else's hopes are dashed. 

Is there an intriguing matchup? 

Here are three:

In the West, Chicago vs. Vancouver in a 1-8 matchup. We'll see a completely revamped Blackhawks lineup against Vancouver, the heavy favorite to win the Stanley Cup ... though Vancouver is annually plagued by postseason inconsistency. (Performance anxiety?)

In the East, Pittsburgh vs. Tampa Bay in a 4-5 matchup. You wonder how even these matchups traditionally are, and the absence of Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin has brought out a different identity in the Penguins. They'll face an upstart Tampa Bay team led by Martin St. Louis and Steve Stamkos, one of the NHL's best snipers, though this will be a big matchup of goaltenders in Tampa Bay's Dwayne Roloson and and Pittsburgh's Marc-Andre Fleury. 

In the East, Buffalo vs. Philadelphia in a 3-6 matchup. Like Vancouver, Philadelphia is another heavy favorite to win the Stanley Cup but slowly crumbled at the end of the regular season. Buffalo, meanwhile, rode a late surge to earn a playoff berth. 

The best part about the playoffs, obviously, is the Stanley Cup Finals, and you know you've done something right if you're still playing hockey at that point in June, so don't feel badly for anyone else polishing their golf clubs and booking their trips to Cabo San Lucas.

There are no more shootouts. Fourteen teams are already gone. Sometime in June, you'll look at the scoreboard and see only two teams left (trust me, it's a good place for those two teams to be). In the end, it's about balance. One team will walk away with their place in history. The other will be the answer to one of many trivia questions. 

But isn't that what makes this the best time of the year? 

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Rachel Lenzi covers hockey for the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram

Kyle Rancourt Story

April 12, 2011

Rachel Lenzi

When Joanne and Eric Rancourt took their son, Kyle, to his first hockey game, they noticed something unique about the two-year-old. While some toddlers would get fussy or hold more of a fascination with the team mascot, Kyle Rancourt was captivated by the players on the ice, and he paid full attention to the flow of the game. 

He began skating months later and began playing hockey when he was 5 years old. But only a few years into playing hockey, Kyle was at a crossroads – a place that people don’t reach for years. Hockey wasn’t fun. Skating up and down the ice was hard work. In his second year of playing mites, Kyle battled asthma and he and his family wondered if playing hockey was worth it, or if he should leave the sport. But a coach needed a volunteer to play in goal and Kyle was the first to volunteer.

“He tried it,” Joanne Rancourt said. “And he loved hockey again. He wanted to play, and that was it.”

He was only two, but the game hooked Kyle in. And in five years as a goalie, the game has sustained him through the difficult times that his family has endured. 

A 10-year-old from Gardiner, Mass., Kyle will attend the Tim Thomas Hockey Camps this summer – he will take part in the camp in August in Marlborough, Mass., his second camp in two years. But hockey has provided a family bond, not just for his immediate family but through his parents and grandparents. When Joanne was young, she and her father watched Bruins games, and Eric coached and played hockey, his love for the game encouraged by a youth hockey coach who took an interest in seeing him develop as a goalie. 

“There’s something about hockey, it brings everybody together,” Joanne said. “You don’t think about anything else in that time you’re watching a game. It’s very relaxing.”

Yet his family has struggled, and when Kyle needed something to hold onto, hockey became Kyle's salvation. His father is a Gulf War veteran who nearly died on the operating table during major surgery. His mother was diagnosed with breast cancer last summer. As a result, Kyle has had to grow up quickly, but he also discovered the importance of having a release.

“It means a lot to me,” said Kyle, a fourth-grader who plays for Winchendon Youth Hockey in Massachusetts. “It clears my mind of all the stuff that’s gone on."

With her husband limited physically as a result of surgeries, including procedures to remove part of his spine and a rib and a surgery that nearly took his life, it was up to Joanne to keep Kyle active, even after her own diagnosis and treatment. She scheduled her own doctors appointments around her son's hockey games and practices, a decision that some would see as an alarming sacrifice. But to Joanne, it was to provide for her son.

“I was recovering from my last surgery right before camp and I thought, ‘I want to get him to camp,” Joanne said. “I argued with my doctors about treatment and I said, ‘No, we’re not doing this. I have to bring my son to hockey.’ I was more stressed about hockey and how the impact of my diagnosis would affect hockey.

“But Kyle had to grow up a lot.”

Yet like many youth players, Kyle created a vision for himself and his future in the sport. He talks about where he wants to play college hockey, and continuously talks about what he learned at his first Tim Thomas Hockey Camp last summer.

“I liked that they worked on a lot of things that me and other kids weren’t doing right, and they taught you how to do it right," Kyle said. "They really helped me out. It made me happy, really happy. Just to learn the stuff I wasn’t doing right and to correct it, and to do it a lot better.”

At the camps, Kyle not only met other goalies, but met college and professional hockey players who served as camp counselors – people he could relate to on a certain level.

“He saw it and thought, ‘I can be that kid,’ ” Joanne said. “It gave him more of a drive. He really started thinking about high schools and about colleges.”

And his experience has already helped fulfill one of his mother’s hopes for him - that his journey through hockey has impacted him in a good way. Likewise, Kyle believes that the involvement of his parents and grandparents, not just in the game but as a collective group - a team, if you will - have aided him in finding his lifelong passion for hockey. 

"It makes me happy," he said. "It makes me feel good to see my family doing that, being involved.”

***

Rachel Lenzi covers hockey for the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram