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“And what will we do if the Rangers win tonight?”

It was a leading question, one my father posed to me as he looked over his right shoulder while we waited at a red light.

“We’ll boo them!” I shouted back from the backseat of the car, answering naively and excitably, as if the query called for a mindless call-and-response.

“No,” my father responded, “We won’t boo them.

“We don’t have to cheer, but we will stick around to see New York lift the Stanley Cup if they win tonight, and we’ll stand and we’ll clap. Winning the Stanley Cup is an achievement that deserves respect, even if we don’t want to see it happen.”

This exchange is seared into my memory, though it happened over 30 years ago. I was 7 at the time. It ranks easily among my most vivid, formative childhood recollections.

I even remember the specific intersection we were stopped at — on Nelson, just west of Burrard, heading toward Pacific Coliseum from the West End of downtown Vancouver.

It was June 11, 1994, and my dad had bought us tickets to see the Vancouver Canucks host the New York Rangers in Game 6 of the Stanley Cup Final, which the Rangers led 3-2. The game itself, a 4-1 demolition to extend the series, is fondly remembered by Canucks fans of a certain vintage as the greatest game in franchise history.

Of course, at least in my direct recollection, the outcome that night was secondary.

Memory can be a funny, inconsistent thing. I don’t actually remember celebrating the Jeff Brown goals that night, although I must’ve done so with the standard, easily distracted exuberance of a 7-year-old hockey fan. I can’t recall having any reaction at all to the Mark Messier cheap shot on Trevor Linden, which set the stage for Jim Robson’s iconic “He’ll play on crutches” call. I don’t even really recollect the video review controversy that surrounded Geoff Courtnall’s 4-1 goal (which superseded Messier’s 3-2 goal on review).

The details of the game itself are fuzzy and impersonal memories, informed as much by the highlights I’ve watched in the years since than by my attendance at the Pacific Coliseum on that fateful June 1994 night.

The car ride with my dad to the game, though, and the lesson that he taught me, that I recall with visceral clarity.

I feel like I owe it to you to explain why I’ve been absent for the beginning of this Canucks season.

On Oct. 3, my father, Jonathan Drance, died suddenly in downtown Vancouver.

He was 71, and while he’d battled a bronchial illness in the summer and had been worryingly slow to recover from it, his death came as a great and discombobulating shock to our family.

On some level, I still can’t comprehend the finality of it all. “It doesn’t seem real” is a phrase I’ve thought to myself and even muttered under my breath repeatedly over the past few weeks.

It’s difficult to describe, but there’s this acute awareness of absence that sets in when one sustains a personal loss this sudden and this seismic.

As we’ve worked through making arrangements and as I’ve fitfully worked through my grief, I’ve pored over the digital echoes of my dad’s contemporary life.

The 35 answering machine messages that I still have from him, all of them beginning in the exact same, almost preposterously affectionate way, “Hey T, it’s Daddy,” that I’d never even really taken stock of before.

The years of text messages exchanged, mostly working through logistics in planning to get together for a meal or a walk with the dog or to watch a football or hockey game or an F1 race.

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Jonathan Drance with Thomas’ dog. (Courtesy of Thomas Drance)

“You know how I feel about bad football,” I said after it was suggested that we should get together to watch an especially unappealing Monday Night Football matchup last winter. “I prefer it to good football! If the game sucks we’ll just talk.”

“Fine with me, as noted, the point is really just to get together,” he agreed.

It’s the emails, however, that I’m going to miss most of all. My dad was a prolific sender of emails.

He sent emails constantly. Thoughtful thank you notes; opinions about the news of the day; questions about technology; show, wine and book recommendations; lists of songs and bands he was enjoying at the gym. He’d send along links to interesting articles or threads on the website formerly known as Twitter, annotated with a joke or a bit of insight, and all of it interspersed with far too many ellipses.

Best of all though were the forwarded articles from The Athletic. When my dad died, I didn’t just lose my father, confidant and close friend, I also lost my most loyal and thoughtful reader and commenter.

I didn’t get these emails every morning, but very regularly over the past six years, my dad would forward along some recent column or article or piece of analysis that I’d published on this site, complete with some bit of commentary.

Sometimes it was as simple as a pithy joke. When I ran an interview with Dan Hamhuis following his retirement, my dad quipped, “Occurs to me he should open a delicatessen.”

Sometimes he was defensive on my behalf. “I liked the article a lot more than your commenters did,” he wrote me once, after a piece of controversial analysis was widely panned in the comment section.

The one that really got me, however, was the email that he sent reacting to a piece I’d written about a Troy Stecher playoff goal in the Edmonton bubble following the death of Stecher’s father that previous spring.

My dad at the time was operating as a caregiver for his own father and working through end-of-life matters in the midst of the pandemic. My grandfather, Stephen, would ultimately die two and a half weeks after the article ran in The Athletic, a possibility that I’d imagine was weighing heavily on my dad when he read the piece.

“I was alright until the last line — maybe even the last word or two — and then suddenly, very suddenly, I wasn’t,” My dad wrote of his reaction to that piece. “Who the f— decided to secretly cook onions in my kitchen this morning?”

I’ve found it helpful over the past few weeks, as dreadful and difficult as they’ve been, to reflect on the many silver linings of my dad’s life, and the untimely end of it.

My father didn’t suffer and he wasn’t alone when he passed.

I maximized my time with him since moving back to Vancouver in 2019, and we were deeply integrated into one another’s lives and weekly routines. I was incredibly lucky to have that time with him.

I also didn’t wait too long to make sure he knew how much I enjoyed spending time with him, or how much I appreciated his readership and supportive feedback. And he didn’t wait too long to make sure both my sister and I knew for certain how proud he was of us and the families and lives that we’d built.

Here’s another silver lining: my dad wasn’t a Canucks fan.

A proud Vancouverite, my dad lived in this city for roughly 50 of his 71 years on this planet. He came of age, however, in the late 1960s, in an era before the Canucks existed, and as such, he grew up a Montreal Canadiens fan. Jean Béliveau was his favourite player as a boy. I even remember waiting in line with my grandfather to get Béliveau’s autograph on his biography in the mid-1990s, which we gifted to my father for Christmas one year.

As any Canucks fan can tell you, “Just one Cup before I die” is a constant, worried about and whispered refrain among hardcore, fatalistic hockey fans in this city. My father, however, was spared that blight.

He was the rare lifelong Vancouverite who got to see his favourite hockey team win plenty of championships in his lifetime.

In two critical moments, my father shaped the course of my career.

In the summer of 2008, between my third and fourth year of university, I wrote the LSAT. I thought, until that point, that I’d be a lawyer like both of my parents were.

I studied hard for the test, legitimately and with discipline, and I completely bombed.

I remember being shook by my lack of progress. My score on the actual test was the exact same as my score on my very first practice test at the outset of the preparatory process, which I’d written while inhibited by a significant hangover.

When I got my mediocre grade, I went over to see my dad. I told him I didn’t think the law was suitable for me, given that the aptitude the test was trying to measure, was something I seemed to lack almost entirely.

Instead of being disappointed, as I’d perhaps feared, he seemed relieved.

He told me that, very much unlike him, I’d never really encountered a rule that I’d had much respect for. He told me that the key wasn’t what I did, but that I found something that I’d be comfortable being defined by. “I’m a lawyer first,” was his view of himself, and why he’d succeeded. He believed that you needed to make that sort of commitment to succeed at just about anything. It’s that discipline that he wanted for me, more than anything else.

Lastly, he suggested that with my proficiency as a writer and deep-seated love of argument, that I might want to consider news media. My dad wasn’t a perfect father or person, far from it, but he knew his son.

The second key moment came a few years later in the spring of 2013. I was 26 and I’d been laid off from a social media marketing job that I’d held down for three or so years in Toronto, following university. Desolate, but with a lot of free time all of a sudden, I went to visit my sister, who had spent much of the past decade living in Asia, but was back in North America on maternity leave with my new niece.

At this point in my career, I had enough of a freelance footprint as a hockey blogger to make rent on writing alone. Just about everyone in my life, however, felt I needed a full-time job especially given that I was already in my mid-20s.

While I was visiting my family for an extended stretch out west, my dad suggested something different.

“Have you considered,” he asked, as was his usual Socratic way, “Just trying to make this hockey writing thing happen?”

It was the push I needed and the best advice I ever received. I wrote constantly for the next five months, working as a freelancer for just about every outlet that would pay me for words. In July of that year, I landed my first full-time job in the sports media business.

Noted coach, executive and all-around philosopher king Pat Riley once described professional sports as the “Toy department of human affairs.”

The games themselves, the sense of civic attachment that fans impose onto laundry, the X’s and O’s, the salary cap minutiae and the media personae of the athletes themselves, it all matters up to a point. What this is all really about, however, is the people we’re fortunate enough to experience it all with.

It’s really not about the wins or the losses. Results are as fleeting as time itself.

What lasts and what matters is the act of gathering and participating, as teammates, as competitors, as a community, with friends, with family. Professional sports isn’t just about winning, it’s about the practice — and, yes, obviously, the commercialization — of shared values, experience and memory.

We love watching and playing sports because they remind us that excellence is worth pursuing, that cooperation is an essential part of competition, and that some achievements deserve our respect, even if we don’t want to see them happen. We love sports because it’s an excuse to bring people together to share the moment.

That’s what I learned from my old man across a lifetime spent happily watching bad football, and other higher quality sporting events too. Adrift in my grief, it’s that perspective that I cherish most.

Because above all else, as terribly as I’ll miss my dad, when I remember him, I’ll know for sure that we prioritized sharing those moments countless times, and did so with affection, warmth and a loving appreciation for one another’s company. What more can anyone ask for?