Out of many seasons of NHL playoffs I have watched with bated breath, this season’s finale is beginning to become a series of firsts and one of the most memorable set of match-ups I have ever seen.

In particularly, as many fans might have suspected, the Detroit Red Wings and the Chicago Blackhawks played a Stanley Cup series I will not forget for quite a while.

Although the song has been sung, the scores have been measured and the teams have been weighed in Chicago’s favor, many fans to this day are still throwing arguments this way and that way about how it all turned out.

I am sure you all have seen the rants and declarations on Facebook, Twitter, graffiti in bathrooms, tattoos and other forms of textual shout-outs to anyone who might read or listen to them.

This article is not going to be a rant session or a declaration  of bad calls or the performance of one team over another. For the record, I consider myself neutral to this topic after spending a semester as the sports editor of this paper.

Both the Wings and the Hawks are phenomenal teams made up of immensely talented players and both teams put everything they had into the series in order to make it last through seven games. Good and bad calls happen in every single game, from finals to scrimmages.

Of course, it is entirely natural to feel prideful and patriotic toward your favored team. Such natural emotions have been the pinnacle behind the crowds and the roars at sporting events since the beginning of human existence.

So many people on both sides of the battlefield may or may not have words such as “disgusted” or “furious” to describe how they felt after the series was over.

What I felt during each of those seven games was an emotion entirely different: impressed, as most of those games were some of the most equally matched bouts of ice hockey I have ever seen.

Don’t get me wrong. There were awful calls from the dudes in stripes during almost every one of those games. Those calls were not just directed at one team, neither, as I clearly saw good and bad calls landing on both of the teams on the ice.

Also, being from the lower peninsula, my blood naturally wants to boil red and white for the boys from Hockeytown.

My family has been enormous Red Wing fans since I can remember.

In the same breath, I’m incredibly impressed with the Blackhawks’ record this year. Some may call it luck or many other synonyms of the word, but you have to have something positive working behind you if you can manage a record like the one they held as they went into the playoffs.

Still, as I watched the puck soar off of the stick of a Blackhawk into the Red Wings’ net, I knew there was going to be an uproar in every medium of social networking imaginable, even more so than what is customary after any sporting event. I was almost afraid to hop online during that moment in time, even for casual purposes.

The Facebook news feed or the homepage of Twitter was going to be buzzing with slams, insults, complaints and other perfectly natural expulsions of human spirit.

There is a line, though, in my humblest opinion, that should not be crossed.

I can’t say what that line is for certain (and I’d like to hear from the person who thinks they have the one and only correct answer to this), but it’s a line that is crossed when a sport no longer becomes enjoyable for any watching party to spectate or talk about when it is embedded with such extreme opinion and blatant closed mindedness.

Let’s take the final game of the series between the Wings and the Hawks as a direct example. In my mind, any game that comes down to overtime with a score of 1-1 is an amazing and exciting game.

To me, a tied score held until the final moments of time past regulation stands as a testament to how evenly matched the two teams on the ice (or any other comparable playing field) are.

Not once did I see this concept noted on any individual’s Facebook page or even on a single professional-grade sports column anywhere else.

I only heard about one or two of the calls made by referees following the final buzzer. The rest of the game was left shrouded in abandoned memory.

Another thing that was noted increasingly after the conclusion of the final game were the chants of Blackhawk fans as they booed the Red Wings off of the ice as they left the arena, defeated.

While I, personally, do not condone bad sportsmanship in any shape, way or form, I think it is safe for me to say that chants such as the aforementioned are simply inevitable at every high-octane sporting event.

Take every NMU hockey game into perspective.

If you listen to the chants and calls echoing forth from within the stadium, both from the student section and regular attendance sections, alike, you will hear shouts of insulting nature to the other team.

In somewhat rarer circumstances, you will also hear shouts of similar regard targeted at NMU’s own Green and Gold.

Yet, most of the time, these exclamations are deemed acts of usual practice.

What makes NHL games or playoff, for that matter, much different? Either way, the players will skate on to play another game during another season.

I love being a fan of a team and shouting both words of encouragement and cries of dismay for or against the teams in play, once again, and I think both are fairly assumed to be completely routine at sporting events, but to focus on negative calls that are out of our control for a game that is no longer in existence save for in memory is a tough thing for a sports fan to swallow.