“Hockey is simply the best sport out there. This coming from someone who did not grow up with hockey (Miami Beach is not exactly your hockey Mecca). I place being at Game 7 of the Stanley Cup finals and watching Dave Andreychuk lift Stanley over his head just beneath the birth of my children!”
– Cookie, May 27, 2007

The kids thought it was a little funny that we’d be visiting somebody named Cookie, or “Kakan” as Son called her, translating “cookie” into Swedish. Wife and I thought it was a little exciting, almost a little wild, to make travel plans to Florida and include in them a night at a complete stranger’s house, even if she is a retired school teacher, and a redhead named Cookie.

Of course, Cookie wasn’t really a stranger, she was just somebody we had never met. After all, I had been emailing with her since that first message in May 2007 which she sent as a reply to a blog post of mine on NHL.com. And, we’re Facebook friends.

Over the last five years, she had sent us hats and posters, and her favorite children’s book – “The Giving Tree” – and I had helped her write signs in Finnish and Swedish and I, too, had sent her books (of mine that she had bought, but still), and in the process, we had become friends.

And of course, we did know that she was a hockey fan.

People often ask me whether I cheer for Finland or Sweden when the two nations play against each other, and when I say neither, or that it doesn’t matter to me anymore, they seem disappointed. So sometimes, I play along and look sad or happy, depending on who it is I’m speaking with.

I haven’t been a fan of any hockey team since I was 16, if a fan is someone who follows mostly just one team and wears their colors, and whose life’s ups and downs follow the ups and downs of the team. I used to be a big Helsinki Jokerit fan as a kid, then switched to Helsinki IFK in my pre-teens when my favorite player made that switch, but somewhere along the line I lost interest in cheering for teams and just started to follow my favorite players.

Now I’m not cheering for anybody, or anything, but the game itself.

The blog post I wrote five years ago was about two serious hockey fans. One of them, my friend Peter Forsberg – not the former player, and not the vice chairman of the Swedish hockey federation – talked about having the logos of the Stanley Cup winners tattooed on his back, and the other, Jamie, had named her kids Journey (as in “Don’t Stop Believin’”) Alexa (as in “Alex Ovechkin”) and Patrick (as in “Roy”).

Cookie’s first email to me began with, “My goodness, and I thought I was a hockey fanatic”. Now I know she was just being modest. While Peter is still just talking about his tattoos, Cookie, did skip work to welcome the Tampa Bay Lightning back home after Game 6 of the 2004 Stanley Cup final, a game the Lightning had won to force a Game 7 in Tampa. And she was a school teacher.

Cookie and her husband Steve have got an impressive bobblehead and stick collection, they’ve seen the Lightning play in numerous arenas around the country, and they’re season ticket holders. (Or a season ticket and a half holders). When a former Lightning player signs with a Swedish or Finnish team, Cookie sends me a message, telling me to say hi for her, should I speak with the player.

“Oh, he’ll remember me. Just say that the redhead who’s always at the practices says hi,” she says.

There’s not a player on the team they haven’t met, and few stars on the visiting teams they haven’t talked to. They seem to know everybody.

For example, Cookie’s also email pals with the Lightning’s former GM, Jay Feaster, who’s now the GM of the Calgary Flames. When Dan Boyle’s mother wanted to meet Steve Yzerman, the GM of Team Canada, it was her friend Cookie who helped her. She sent a message to Jay, Jay sent a message to Steve, and the mother of an Olympic gold medal winner got to meet the GM who picked her son to the team.

And that’s the best part. She’s a force of good.

There’s also the story of Steve’s sweat shirt. The sweat shirt itself is just another sweat shirt, but on it, Steve has collected the autographs of every single player who played for the Tampa Bay Lightning in the 2008-09 season.

Well, almost.

That year the Lightning used 52 players, which is a lot of players for one team in one season. So Steve was busy getting autographs on her sweatshirt.

Geoff Kinrade, a defenseman, played only one game with the team before he was sent back to the farm team, or maybe the farm team’s farm team, and Steve never got a chance to get his autograph.

“Later that year, I spoke with the coach, and he said it got so bad by the end of the season that one night when he walked into the locker room, there was a player he didn’t recognize. So he asked the player who he was, and he said, ‘I’m playing defense for you tonight, coach’,” Steve said.

“Before the coach had time to say anything, I looked at him and said, ‘Geoff Kinrade’,” he added, and laughed.

Geoff Kinrade. They’ll find him one day.

At 4.45, as usual, Steve drove the car out of the garage. It was time to go. The Lightning was going to take on the Montreal Canadiens, puck drop at 7.30, but by leaving early, they could park the car in Steve’s special, secret – and free – spot, and listen to the Lightning founder, hockey legend Phil Esposito on the satellite radio on the way.

At the arena, they said hi to Al at the souvenir shop, then had their pre-game dinner at the Outback Steakhouse, as usual, and chatted with some friends – like Mad Dog and his wife Bobbie, also season ticket holders – before it was time for Cookie to go down to the ice level and tape her signs on the plexiglass. In her bag, Cookie had 6-7 different signs, each with a message to a different player. Vincent Lecavalier had got his sign, too, in French, even though he was out of the lineup that night.

She stood there with her other friends, banging on the glass, cheering on the players all through the warmups, and when the players left the ice, she collected her signs, put them back in her bag, climbed up the stairs, greeted the usher, another person she knew, one more time, and walked to her own seat to watch the game.

She usually sits a little higher up, but since I had an empty seat next to me, she sat with Son and me. (The school teacher in her made the hockey fan in her watch her language, so that Son wouldn’t get any bad influence, she told me). Steve, on the other hand, had his seat in the upper bowl, and with the Lightning holding onto a one-goal lead, he didn’t want to jinx anything by joining us.

Instead, they met afterwards at their usual meeting point where they went through the game, met with friends, and swapped tickets for future games.

And with a winner’s swagger, we walked out of the arena, across the yard, over the bridge, and down the street back to the car, which was waiting for us in that perfect spot.

The next day, Cookie and Steve went to watch the Lightning practice, and we headed to Disney World and Hogwarts. I saw that Cookie had posted a photo of her new Lightning ear rings on her Facebook page. And a photo of me and Wife and Son and Daughter from the day before.

In the photo, we stand in front of their house, with the “Welcome Team Pakarinen” sign that was taped to their door when we got there, behind us.

And as the Lightning players know, it doesn’t get any better than that. We got our own sign from Cookie.