I want to be clear about something before I start: I am not okay. The Blackhawks beat the Minnesota Wild on Wednesday night, 2-1, and I have been sitting in my booth at Schaller’s Pump for fourteen hours trying to process it. The waitress asked me if I wanted another coffee and I said “Vlasic” and she walked away. I don’t blame her.

Let me give you the numbers, because the numbers are the only part of this that makes sense. The last time the Chicago Blackhawks beat the Minnesota Wild was December 15, 2019. That’s six years ago. Six years. In that time I have watched nineteen consecutive losses to this team — eighteen in regulation and one in overtime, which was worse because it let me hope first. I watched them lose 4-1. I watched them lose 5-2. I watched them lose in ways that I will not describe because my doctor told me to stop reliving them. Nineteen times I sat down in front of the television, and nineteen times I stood up older and angrier and more certain that I would never see this team beat the state of Minnesota at anything, including a staring contest.

And then Wednesday night Connor Bedard — who was thirteen years old the last time we beat these people, think about that — scored a goal and Alex Vlasic blocked a shot with his body in the final seconds and the horn went off and I did not know what to do. I’m being serious. I physically did not know what to do. My body had no muscle memory for this. I have spent six years developing an elaborate post-loss routine — turn off the TV, pour two fingers of Malört, call my brother to complain, go to bed mad — and suddenly none of it applied. I just stood there in my living room like a man who’d walked into the wrong apartment.

My brother called me. “Did that just happen?” he said. I said I thought so. He said he’d been watching with his kids, and his eight-year-old daughter asked him why he was crying. “Because the Blackhawks won,” he told her. She said, “Don’t they do that sometimes?” and he had to explain that no, actually, against this particular team, they do not do that. They do the other thing. They have always done the other thing. She asked him what the other thing was and he said “lose” and she said “oh” and went back to her iPad. Which is honestly the correct response. I wish I had an iPad.

Here’s what gets me. The kid — Bedard — he’s twenty years old and he’s wearing an ‘A’ on his jersey now because they traded away everyone who used to wear letters. Foligno, Murphy, Dickinson — gone. The leadership of this team is now a kid who was in middle school during the last Stanley Cup parade and a bunch of guys whose names I have to look up on my phone. And somehow this is the group that broke the streak. Not the 2020 team, not the 2022 team, not any of the teams that were supposedly better and definitely more expensive. This team. These kids. I don’t understand sports and I have been watching them for forty-seven years.

The broadcast said Bedard has 65 points in 55 games this season, which puts him on pace to blow past last year’s total by a wide margin. Good for him. Terrific. I’m glad the rebuild is working. But I need everyone to understand that I did not care about any of that on Wednesday night. I cared about one thing: that for the first time since the Obama administration was still a recent memory, a hockey game against Minnesota ended with the correct number on the correct side of the scoreboard. That’s it. That’s the whole thing. Call it small. Call it petty. I don’t care. I have earned this.

My wife asked me this morning if I was going to write about it. I said I didn’t know if I had anything to say. She said, “You’ve been talking about it for fourteen hours.” Fair point. So here it is: the Blackhawks beat the Wild. The streak is over. I’m going to go home, pour two fingers of Malört anyway, and call my brother to not complain. It’ll be the strangest phone call of my life.

They play Minnesota again in April. I’m already nervous.