It’s one thing to look at a partner and come to the realization that a relationship is no longer in the best interest of either party involved.
It’s another thing entirely to pack everything up, find a new place and move into those new surroundings without that partner, marking a definitive end to that chapter of life.
That feels like the best way to describe what it’s been like to watch Patrick Kane first and now Jonathan Toews have their Chicago careers officially close, with Toews playing in his final Blackhawks game – and possibly his final NHL game – on Thursday night while Kane is chasing another Stanley Cup with the New York Rangers.
It’s an unsettling, unsatisfying end in so many ways when juxtaposed with the incredible highs produced by this era of Blackhawks hockey. Kane’s not even on the team anymore. Toews’ final appearance was in a game where the best result for the Blackhawks was a regulation loss. Even if Toews found solace in the opportunity for a final curtain call in front of the United Center faithful, there’s something unfulfilling about his last act coming at such an irrelevant time in the team’s history.
But that’s how professional sports works, isn’t it? Shit – that’s how life works. It’s increasingly rare for that last song and dance to end on the perfect note. Spend 15 seasons with one NHL franchise just to have a GM run it into the ground so deeply that the new GM has no choice but to politely point in the direction of unrestricted free agency. Devote 20 years working at a desk job at a big corporation just to have some new CEO deliver a pink slip in the name of “downsizing.” Take over a website that’s been in existence since 2007 for a few years just to have some random VP send an email informing you of a layoff – it really does happen to all of us!
Through all the highlight reels and video montages of Toews’ career that have circulated in the last 24 hours – with Kane a prominent figure throughout as well – one of the main thoughts to emerge from this perspective centers on the undeniable passage of time in those clips. For those of us who are relatively close to them in age – the hand of this 1987 arrival goes up in the air – we can see the progression of our own lives alongside that of Toews’ and Kane’s. Those two arrived in 2007 in Chicago as teenagers as we were either on the verge of finishing high school or navigating our early years of college. They were hoisting Lord Stanley multiple times while we were making the leap to the professional world. They were trying to keep their careers afloat as their franchise plummeted down the NHL standings while we were trying to establish and maintain our own livelihoods. Now, with all of us in their mid-30s, they’re both embarking on new stages of their professional – and personal – lives while many of us are doing the same thing.
This era will always carry the blemishes of what happened away from the ice as well, of course, stains that cannot be dismissed or erased to ensure they do not ever happen again. But that’s also part of the hope that now exists with the clean slate that’s been established with this new wave of incoming players: that future celebrations or reflections will not require similar conflicts of the mind.
So we’ll sit and watch again, with the hope that lurking somewhere within the Blackhawks’ system right now or awaiting in a draft is the next Jonathan Toews and the next Patrick Kane and the next Duncan Keith and the next Brent Seabrook and the next Marian Hossa and the next Niklas Hjalmarsson and the next Corey Crawford and on and on and on, world without end, amen.
Because so much of what sports are all about exists in the hope that the next best thing is just around the corner.