A Flyers fan at 40: Finally, excitement around the team

When you reach this age, you reflect on your journey as a sports fan. You can view it in its entirety, such as being a Philadelphia fan in general, but inevitably, your mind will go to each component that makes up your overall fandom. This brings me to the Philadelphia Flyers, a team whose games I have attended since 1991 and have ardently followed since about 1995.

Many times, it's felt like an extreme one-way street. All giving and no receiving on my part. And I'm not alone. You'd have to at least be a sexagenarian Flyers fan at this point to recall seeing them win a Stanley Cup. And while titles are the ultimate measure of success in sports, many other triumphs can be counted along the way, even if they don't necessarily result in the ultimate goal. Unfortunately, for a Flyers fan of my vintage, even the smaller victories have been few and far between. But perhaps that may change soon.

There looks to finally be some reason for optimism with the Philadelphia Flyers

2024-25 has little chance of being a banner year for the Flyers, and yet there is hope. A lot of it comes in the form of Matvei Michkov, but it also extends to the organizational vision that is finally getting the Flyers on board with shrewd asset management and mastery of the salary cap, a must in today's sporting landscape.

The last decade has been almost a complete write-off, with the club falling into a pattern of "missing the playoffs one year, barely making it and then getting quickly bounced the next year". If this wasn't bad enough, things eventually just morphed into the Flyers being outright bad and never making the postseason at all. Leadership has done a poor job, and the compromised product on the ice outside of Claude Giroux and a smattering of others has underperformed. It would be nice if the Flyers could return to being the kind of consistently dangerous, fun-to-watch club that they were for the majority of my youth (which is now long gone).

Being born in 1984 means that I easily missed the Flyers' glory years and that I was also far too young to enjoy the very good teams that they iced right around the time I was born. Then the dark times arrived just as I was gaining awareness of them, and it took the arrival of Eric Lindros to kickstart the team back into relevance. And what a run it was.

Little did a kid like me know that it wasn't the best idea to live and die with the team on a nightly basis and treat every playoff elimination like a personal affront, but I kept coming back for more. That's the kind of hold that the sport and the team had on me and many others, I would suspect. Expanding interests and responsibilities in life necessitate being less of a fanatic about things like sports as you get older, but I remained a huge fan in the post-Lindros era, through the 2004-05 lockout, and of course, some great playoff runs in 2008 and 2010.

I still proudly bear the mantle of 'huge fan' even today, despite circumstances where I don't attend nearly as many games, routinely miss the Flyers on TV entirely because of other obligations, and don't get completely bent out of shape over poor results. I'd probably be several heart attacks deep if I still clung to every game with the youthful exuberance I did decades ago.

It's such a great sport, especially live, and when the day comes and we see the Flyers back in the postseason, it will be as amazing as we remember it. Probably not this season, but soon. Playoff hockey is such a rush, and I can't wait to get back to that feeling with regularity. At the very least, we seem to have a club that is worth rooting for, who plays with full effort, and is slowly but surely obtaining the kind of talent necessary to succeed, because you can't win with grit alone. Sorry, Gritty.

Although my fandom of the team doesn't extend back all 40 years I've been kicking around here, it's pretty close. And I know there's plenty of passion among the fanbase lying dormant, with people taking a "show me" mentality before they go all-in on the team again. And that's fine because I don't think any Flyers supporter can ever be accused of being a bandwagoner, not after all this team has been through. With each season acting as a clean slate, I feel refreshed and ready to continue this journey. It's going to take me all the way, for better or worse.

Maybe a championship sometime soon? Or at least, in my lifetime? Because I don't want to write some variation of this when I'm 80.