We Lost The Feeling of Anticipation in 2020

“I’ll see you at the Islanders game.”

A year ago, my big Italian family gathered for Christmas Eve as usual, and those were my parting words to my cousin. We both live in the DC area, and our New York Islanders were taking the Acela south for a big game against the Washington Capitals on New Year’s Eve day.

I can’t tell you how excited I was for that game. The Islanders were playing extremely well at that point. The timing of the game couldn’t be any cooler. A 1 p.m. puck drop on New Year’s Eve day?

When my alarm went off that morning, I hopped out of bed like a kid on Christmas. I had to go to the office for a few hours in the morning, and I spent those hours bouncing around in my chair like a kid on…okay, you get the idea.

The day more than lived up to expectations. The Islanders won. My beautiful, perfect wife went to the Irish Channel, our favorite bar, to save us a table before the influx of post-game revelers. We spent hours there. Drinking, eating, and who knows what else. My wife and I made it back to our apartment at some point that night, and we continued the party as the clock struck midnight. What a day. What a night. What a time to be alive. What a way to end the 2010s and kick off a new decade.

Of course, you know the punchline. Within three months, COVID-19 had come ashore in the United States and I haven’t been to my office regularly since. The world changed.

But I’m not here to relive or recount the misery. We all have that shared pain. While I am extremely lucky to have remain employed and not lost any family members to COVID (though some ended up in the hospital), the year still absolutely sucked.

As I’ve thought about the hell we’ve collectively endured this year, I keep thinking about that Islanders game. Not the game itself or the fun we had that day, but the feeling of anticipation that came before it.

When’s the last time you’ve been excited for something to happen?

This year has been a slog in large part because there was nothing to get excited for. Sure, the election was a massive moment, and I could not wait for us to collectively kick that racist idiot to the curb. I wasn’t excited for it, though. If anything, the…