Austin Allen - Ode to the Hartford Whalers lyrics

1979–97, Hartford, CT (“Insurance City”) I I sing for the Hartford Whalers: I mourn for a hockey team that never, like Ahab's sailors, dreamed the implausible dream, or went down as hopeless flailers, failing in the extreme. They skated around their rink and couldn't exactly sink. II In homeroom at age eight, I studied, with fascination, facts about my home state. I worried: our population, with its glacially slow growth rate, was the tiniest in the nation ever to try to support a team in a big-league sport. Yet there, in a vision of green, they were and seemed to belong— Shanahan, Burke, Dineen (I number them all in my song)— till, as I neared thirteen, the facts proved all of them wrong. The team would keep playing, but not in Connecticut. III My own youth hockey days had ended two years prior. I'd set no ice ablaze as a “Northern Connecticut Flyer”; nor, in my first growth phase, had I shot all that much higher. Still I stood tall and roared whenever my Whalers scored… The victory jingle, “Bra** Bonanza,” fills the stadium, gives the fans a thrill. To this extravaganza I devote a special stanza. Suddenly hockey hurt: the Whalers bowed, withdrew; sports, in a final spurt, outgrew me. Shortly I grew out of my Whalers shirt, my state—my family, too (the fabric had started shrinking and our population sinking). IV These days I live down south, but I'm getting a chill again— the draft I felt in youth, joining the league of men. Though all the teeth in my mouth are accounted for, now as then, in dreams they are missing, falling. My team is my family, brawling. And Hartford runs a correction in small print in the Courant's editorial section: “There's no such thing as insurance. We lied for your protection. Innocence builds endurance. But lost is lost is lost: now wake up and eat the cost.” Connecticut seems to remain. My family has mostly gone. I squint from a homebound train at the capitol's snowbound lawn, count each quaint weathervane, a**ess what the weather's done… But the place disclaims all claims. I've stopped watching hockey games: how can a grown man root when the home team may just duck out of its stadium, scoot out of reach like a puck— and home is no absolute, either? With any luck, love learns to improvise on thin blades, on thin ice. V The town once threw a parade when the Whalers survived the first round of the playoffs. They played decently—not their worst— then lost as soon as they'd made the point that they weren't cursed. This happened when I was one; then the glory days were done. But what is athletic grace? And who are sports' true heroes? I watch a Zamboni trace its Zen, concentric zeroes on empty mental space. Within that zone of clear O's, one small black speck will go on eluding me like a koan. I sing for the team I loved in a key that is cheerfully minor. I mourn for the year they moved, left my state with a shiner (though the blow was politely gloved), and settled in Carolina, a market not quite as small. The next year, they won it all.