That's the face of joy -- right there on walk-on placekicker Devin Barclay's face while the ball is still in flight as he put a dagger in Iowa's heart Saturday night in overtime, securing another Big Ten title for the Bucks.Earlier this week former Red Wing great, Steve Yzerman was inducted into the Hall of Fame. I’d love to say The Captain (he’s the longest serving team captain in NHL history) was the reason I became a hockey fan, but I’d be lying. I became a hockey fan watching the ‘94 New York Rangers Stanley Cup run. It was the first time I watched a Cup celebration and that alone made me a fan. What the Cup means to players and fans alike makes hockey special and it made me pay attention to the game for what was really the first time.
From that point I did what I do, which was to gravitate to the local team, the Red Wings. You could call me a fair weather fan for that, and given the stellar run on which the team was about to embark the timing was convenient, but the fact is the timing is merely serendipitous. I was a fan of the Tigers through the miserable 90s and 119 losses in ‘03, a fan of the Pistons during the era of teal, the Wolverines in the midst of a horrendous two year slump, and, of course the Lions. 0-16. Eight years of Millen. There is no greater test of one’s devotion to a sports team than to be a fan of the Detroit Lions. I am many things, some of them not so good, but a fair weather fan is not one of them.
For me, it’s always been about the guys who come to play in southeast Michigan and who become the beating heart of an adulate community that adopts them as their own. Trammell, Whitaker, Inge, and Granderson (god I hope he doesn’t get traded). Sanders, Moore, Spielman, and Porcher. Dumars, Laimbeer (you hated him, we loved him), Wallace (Ben), and Billups (still sucks that he’s gone). Shanahan, Larionov (The Professor!), Lidstrom, and –yes- even the underrated Osgood.
It’s about the history these franchises have, both the tragic (Utley, Brown, Fischer and Konstantinov) and glorious (Layne, Kaline, Horton, and Howe), as well as the wonderful people who surround and built these franchises, names like Illitch, Davidson (RIP), Holland, and the eternally optimistic Harwell (whom we will soon lose to terminal disease).
Not only were each of these people, to a man, amazing in their respective roles, they were and are amazing people. Cars aren’t the only thing Detroit spent the last 50+ years building. It’s also built legends. Some of them, perhaps, just local ones, but they are legends all the same.
Yzerman, though. Yzerman is perhaps the best of them. He is the champion. The Captain. The one name that no person can speak ill of in front of us and not get popped in the mouth. He was the guy you wanted in the faceoff circle at crunch time. He was mettle. He was a leader. He was class. As much as the Rangers Cup celebration initially made me a fan of hockey, it was watching Steve Yzerman lead a team of hockey gods year after year that made me remain one.
To sum up what it means for him to enter the Hall is difficult to do. I still have a hard time thinking of him as retired. When I turn on a game I still expect to see #19 out there on the ice and it still feels wrong when I don’t see him. But really, the best summation of what it means to those of us who watched him play and watched him hoist three Stanley Cups comes from the always excellent Abel to Yzerman blog: Detroit’s Gift to Hockey: 19 to the Masses.
Here’s a portion of the post that’s entirely too long to steal in this fashion, but one that is so simultaneously crass and eloquent that I cannot bear to snip it down:
It was Yzerman who willed us our first, then our second and our third [Stanley Cups]. Oh, I know. They were 8, 9 and 10. But it had been 42 years, man. All we knew were the whispers.
Remember the Free Press photshopped his tooth in? Whatever. He didn’t care. Bettman blathered about something, about Hockeytown and the drought. Whatever. Just give the Cup to Stevie. He did and my frigging God the place exploded. You were at the parade or you said you were and he held that shiny bitch aloft and held it there for hours, or so it seemed. The Cup in the middle of millions. And then next year he put in in Vladdie’s lap because he and 22 other guys said that’s where it belonged.
Four years later the legend was cemented with every shuddering rise from the ice. If you’re a Wing fan you look back at that playoff run and you hear stories of the kind of pain he was in and it brings tears to your eyes because you feel like he did it for you, individually. That’s the effect Yzerman had on Wing fans. You just felt like when he won, he willed it for you. And when the time came for credit and adulation, poof....gone.
But he’s ours no longer. Tonite he becomes hockey’s. And it’s a gift hockey had better be grateful for. Hockey had better stand on its feet tonite and understand that there can be only one. There has never been, and never will be, another Captain like Yzerman. No one has withstood the kind of pain he did, or led as well. Nobody. As Captain Norris said in a comment earlier today, the Hall had better be ready to be humbled.
He’s been ours for nearly three decades, hockey. Tonite we present him to you and the Hall becomes his keeper.
The legacy, though, stays with us.
Word.
Last week I promised to write up something about choice and consequence in Dragon Age and have yet to follow through. That’s largely because I’m still not sure I have a grasp on the scope of these things in the game. I’m about 30-40 hours in, have only completed about 30% of the game, and I still don’t have a very good handle on the full scope of the game and how your decision making affects the world.
I find that very impressive. (With regards to Bioware, not myself. I’m never impressed with myself. Well, I looked damn good as Indiana Jones on Halloween, but that’s pretty much it.)
I will say that I like the extent to which the localized characters react to the events around them. This was a huge problem for me in Fallout 3 because too often critical events would occur and characters would go on like nothing had changed. (The town sheriff in Megaton comes to mind. If he dies only his son seems to notice.) This is not the case in Dragon Age.
***Begin Vague Spoilers***
There is a sequence at one point in the game where I attempted to rally the locals to fight in a dangerous battle. When it was done, several of the townspeople, including one prominent figure there, were dead. I was never able to fight this battle without losing these characters, but my impression is that it is possible for them to survive. Afterward, a cut scene began in which bodies were being sent out on boats to be lit on fire and the local chantry priestess noted the name of the one major town NPC who had died. Judging from the rather rough cut in audio dialog, I’m pretty sure this list can vary based on how many more (or less) you lose.
In one of the boats was the body of another whom had fallen. When I later went to place where he ran a business, one of his employees had taken over and there was an in depth conversation about her decision to stay in town rather than leave. In another area of this plot thread a brother and sister who had lended to me a family heirloom insisted that I keep it, a fairly routine sort of occurrence in an RPG. What made it unique was that I had options for how to respond that included just accepting it and choosing to give them variable amounts of money for it. The amount given directly affected what they would decide to do next. (I think I could have still refused it too, but my memory is hazy.)
***End Vague Spoilers***
I love this aspect of the game. The jury is still very much out on how some decisions affect long term events in the game, but certainly the sense is that in each of the major quest lines there are multiple ways for it to unfold and that your choices there will directly affect the end game. I can’t wait to see how it all turns out because there are choices I’ve made where I was genuinely trying to do the just and noble thing and those choices do include the possibility of generating less than ideal results in the end. I hope that’s the case because more games need to do that.
These sorts of games shouldn’t consistently reward you for endeavoring to take the virtuous path. Sometimes you should be penalized for doing so because trying to “do the right thing” should result in you having to walk a more difficult road; a road that is more disadvantageous to you as a player. I’m really hoping that when I do reach the end game (sometime before the end of the world in 2012) that my attempts to play the ethical character have mixed results. Say, less overall individual power to work with, but perhaps more allies.
