I still don’t get the spending more money you than you can afford on memorabilia and other garbage trinkets, the making it a large part of your personality, the animosity with the other teams, the violence to their city when they lose, and many other bits, but the watching makes sense now.

I think most of that can be explained by a kind of tribalism. The whole system encourages the “fanatic” roots of being a “fan” over or in addition to the “mere passion” for the game. In fact , the Saskatchewan Roughriders football team goes as far as ads stressing the importance of the fan as “the 13th player” on the field (there are only 12 actual players on the field at a time). This has led to a fan base that might be more likely to attend a game in person when the team is struggling. That seems to be a bit of an anomaly in professional sports. (More amusingly, the team also blew a couple of very high profile games by accidentally fielding an actual 13th player! That in turn led to jokes that a dozen beer in Saskatchewan came with 13 cans and references to our inability to distinguish between “a dozen” and "a baker’s dozen, both of which seemed to only increase the “tribal” passion of the team’s fans.)

As far as I can tell, the passion exists without the worst of the fan tribalism at the recreational and kids level. On the other hand, that passion and the whole “coach/analyst” thing might explain many of the toxic behaviours that arise in “hockey parents”.

And I think that tribalism at the team level is behind most of the toxicity inside the locker room and in team behaviours outside the arena. The Canadaland podcast group recently did an excellent series on the problems inside junior hockey that highlights the problem.

All of which is way way off topic, but I hope we’re deep enough in the thread to not matter.