Everyone Else Is in on the Canuck Secret

Lately, on my other blog at Second City Hockey.com, I've been noticing a trend.

A lot of readers from other teams and cities have been chiming in. We get that from time to time. And they have admitted to in the past not understanding our hatred for Vancouver.

It would be odd from the outside, as this was a team whose skull we used as a flower pot the past two years, and then took them to the absolute limit when we were banged up and exhausted, giving some validation to what was a disappointing season. If you didn't live here, didn't follow the Hawks, you'd think we'd welcome the sight of the Blue and Green, it usually led to entertainment.

But they get it now.

The overwhelming correspondence we get is that everyone sees the Canucks for what they are now. The apologies for criticizing the way we described Vancouver and their fans in the past have been flowing. The rest of the league's fans are finding out what we already knew: The Canucks are a tasteless, classless, tactless organization and fanbase.

We didn't need Alex Burrows to bite Patrice Bergeron to know that he's probably the biggest piece of vermin in the league. We've watched him multiple times try and goad the mountainous Patrick Kane into a fight, only to flee when anyone over 5-10 skates within five feet of him. We watched him pull Duncan Keith's hair in a "fight" in 2009. The rest of the league found that funny, but now they see the pattern.

The evidence of their GM's whining didn't finally convince us that the Canucks were paranoid beyond all belief. We'd seen that before. They turned Dustin Byfuglien into Godzilla approaching Tokyo before last year's series had even started. They moaned constantly about net presence that was perfectly legal. But the rest of the people know now.

We'd seen Henrik Sedin's diving for three years. It was generally the only time we noticed him. But now the rest of hockey's followers can watch this dispicable cheating. The goading, the yapping, the turning tali and running at the sign of real conflict approaching. It's old news to us.

And the infestation of Canucks fans on every blog everywhere to defend their "honor", to gloat over victories we'd already achieved last year, the complete inability to fathom why no one likes them, everyone's getting what we've had for years. This is a Canadian team that couldn't rally the rest of Canada around them to bring home the Chalice that they consider theirs. That's really saying something, that even their own nation wants nothing to do with them.

Welcome in, hockey world. We've been here awhile, and we didn't make anything up.

Sam Fels is the proprietor of The Committed Indian, an unofficial program for the Blackhawks. You may have seen him hocking the magazine outside the United Center at Gate 3. The program is also available for purchase online. Fels is a lifelong 'Hawks fan and he also writes for Second City Hockey .

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