I stole this from a hockey card blog

I have been a fan of the Canadian band The Tragically Hip since 1992. That was the year the band released its landmark album, "Fully Completely," and '92 was also the year that a co-worker handed me a copied cassette tape of the album with his handwritten list of the songs.

It is one of three personal moments I think of when someone mentions The Hip.

Steve was from Buffalo, like me. He walked with a slight limp, the result of being pinned between two cars in the first few months of working his new newspaper job. Steve enjoyed alternative bands like The Hip and Pavement. He said I'd like The Tragically Hip, who hailed from across the river in Kingston, Ontario, and gave me the "Fully Completely" copy and a cassette of an earlier Hip album "Road Apples".

The second moment I think of is walking into the Clarkson University hockey locker room each time after a game from 1993-95. After most games, music played loudly in the new, spacious room. And since many of the players were Canadian, almost all of the music was The Hip.

I'd hear the songs while looking for the right players to interview and recognize the songs. I felt a bond with those players because they liked the songs that I had grown to like.

It started as bit of a ruse, I admit. I was trying to immerse myself in hockey culture. I didn't grow up a hockey fan or a hockey card collector. I bought a few cards back in the late '70s, that was it. After moving to Buffalo, I watched the sport off and on, but never cared about it much.

But now, hockey was my job. I needed to know the sport and the people in it. I watched the games, pro and college, learned the names, and began collecting hockey cards.

The set I collected happens to be one of the most pervasive hockey sets of all-time, 1991-92 Pro Set. I accumulated more cards from that set than of any non-baseball set in my life to that point. I knew all of the names, Horacek, Tinordi, Kypreos, Berube, stars and fourth-liners.

I focused on hockey rules and lingo and became quite proficient at describing the game, even though I never played it as a kid. I admit it was a struggle early on though, and I felt in those early days that I'd be discovered for being unknowledgeable and a fraud. I hoped if I ever did get accused, that I could sing my way out of it with a few bars of "At the Hundredth Meridian" or "Three Pistols".

As hockey card collectors know, the 91-92 Pro Set came in two versions. One set featured English card backs and the other set French backs. Where I lived, way in the northern hinterlands of the U.S., you could get both versions. I don't know if the packs weren't explicit enough on the front or I just wasn't paying attention in my pack-buying frenzy (I bought EVERYTHING in 1992), but I would come home with English cards sometimes and French cards other times.

I was kind of disappointed by the French, just because I couldn't read it. But it seems cool now.

To this day, no matter how widespread that set is, I still have great nostalgic memories for 91-92 Pro Set and really should collect it someday, because I got rid of almost all of my cards from that set years ago.

I did keep one though:

This is a card of the famous photo of the Maple Leafs' Bill Barilko scoring the Stanley Cup-winning goal in 1951. Barilko would die in a plane crash soon after scoring that season-ending goal and his body wasn't found until more than a decade later.

Barilko was immortalized in The Tragically Hip song "50 Mission Cap" off the "Fully Completely" album. I knew nothing about Barilko until that early '90s convergence of Pro Set and The Hip.

That's interesting to me because I also didn't know until The Hip's lead singer, Gord Downie, died earlier this week that the lyrics from "50 Mission Cap" came from the back of that very Pro Set Bill Barilko card.

I knew the lyrics -- "I stole this from a hockey card" -- but I just assumed it was artistic license by Downie or he took it from some card from the '50s back when Barilko played.

Then, while reading stories about Downie after his death, commiserating with fellow Hip fans (I know people in Buffalo, Rochester, Plattsburgh and Burlington, Vt., all pockets of Hip fandom here in the U.S.), I came across the blog Puck Junk's posting about The Tragically Hip and the Pro Set card from more than a year ago.

There, I learned from Sal, that Downie "stole" the lyrics from the back of that Pro Set card, which was in my collection!

The words on the back of the card: "Unfortunately, it was the last goal of Barilko's career. He disappeared that summer on a fishing trip, and the Leafs didn't win another Cup until 1962, the year his body was found."

The lyrics in the song: "Bill Barilko disappeared that summer. He was on a fishing trip. The last goal he ever scored won the Leafs the Cup. They didn't win another until 1962. The year he was discovered."

And then Downie's admission: "I stole this from a hockey card."

"Awesome" I thought. I have that card!

I scrambled to dig up the card. I honestly couldn't remember where I stored it. But I finally unearthed the binder, looked with amazement at Barilko diving toward the goal, and then flipped it over to read those words/lyrics, only to find:

FRENCH?!?!?

Dammit, I can't read that!

I've since reacquired a few of the 91-92 Pro Set cards, but they're all in English. I just assumed that all the Pro Sets I had were English ones. I must've saved the Barilko from back in '92.

I had given up my hockey card pursuit by the mid-1990s and then I stopped covering hockey and pretty much watching hockey, too. I keep urging myself every year to get back into the sport the way I did in the early '90s, but baseball just keeps taking more and more of my free time.

But with Downie's passing, I had to read the back of that card -- in English -- to make the comparison.

So I went back to Puck Junk.

There it is. I stole this from a hockey card blog.

Although my allegiance to hockey card collecting waned, my allegiance to The Hip didn't. I purchased several more of their albums -- "Day for Night," "Trouble at the Henhouse," "Phantom Power". I could always rely on them making their way across the border at least as far as where I lived.

The third Tragically Hip memory comes from 2002. That was the year "In Violet Light" was released, a Hip album I particularly enjoyed. We went to an amusement park that summer during the 4th of July. I've never liked the loudness of fireworks -- although I've gotten over it in recent years -- and when it came time to set them off, I'd go off to the farthest reaches of the park, as far as I could from the noise, to the darkened children's rides section.

There, on some metal bleachers, I'd listen to "The Dire Wolf," which best as I can determine is about shipwrecks, not fireworks, on full volume in my ear buds, as I watched the pretty colors above.

Now that I think of it, I should have played "Fireworks".

RIP, Gord.