The Future

If you've ever been driving along a US interstate, you may encounter a sign like the one to the left. If that seems like an odd mile marker, apparently there have been a rash of thefts of mile markers for mile 69 and mile 420 in the US. I guess some people never grow out of that teenage mentality, but today's article here on HBIC is #6899. It's not a significant number nor is tomorrow's article that will see the odometer on the blog roll over to 6900, but it will be July 1 which got me thinking about the future. There will be more to talk about tomorrow, but the demise of Hockey Night in Canada on CBC combined with some of the stuff happening in and around hockey regarding the state of the game has me truly questioning whether or not I want to continue talking about hockey.

As it stands, I'll hit post #7000 on October 9, 2026 if I continue posting once per day. The NHL season, expanded to 84 games in this upcoming season, will reportedly start on September 29, 2026. The Canada West schedule kicks off on October 9, the AHL season begins on October 2, and the ECHL kicks off on October 16. Ending the blog before most of hockey get underway this season would be the right time to pull the plug on something I've been doing for two decades.

That's the other thing: twenty years of blogging about hockey on a daily basis is a heckuva commitment. HBIC existed before Netflix, Instagram, and the iPad. People had never heard of jobs like "App Developer" or "Social Media Manager" when I started HBIC. CDs and DVDs was how most media was consumed by the public, composite sticks were just hitting the hockey market, the NHL salary cap was $44 million, and the NHL only had 30 teams in the league.

What I'm saying is that everything changes. To quote James Earl Jones in Field of Dreams, life "has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It's been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again" as time has moved forward. Things change, thing go away, and other things replace them. That's how I feel about writing about hockey - the game has changed in ways that no longer light the fire inside me.

I'm not a writer, an author, or a journalist. Some may even contest my ability to form coherent thoughts, but that's a whole other story. I never once thought I'd be doing this twenty years after starting it. I thought I'd ride the wave of an emerging trend and, like a candle, it would simply flicker to an end... except people kept reading. I guess I was doing something right? So I kept writing about hockey.

Officially, there is no decision to end the blog right now, but that October 9 date looms large. I've already made one decision about the blog that I'll announce tomorrow, but the horizon is getting closer. I'm going to enjoy Canada Day tomorrow by forgetting about hockey for a while. There's lots of stuff happening, so I'll go and focus on that and forget about the free agency madness that overtakes hockey.

Enjoy Canada Day tomorrow, folks! It's the best place on the planet!

Until next time, keep your sticks on the ice!