If you’re into reading your dreams, a dream about a queen or meeting someone in power (royalty) can take on certain meaning.  One of the encapsulating summaries I read on the topic was this:

If you’re a queen in your dream, it’s likely that you have an as-yet unrealized desire for power, influence, and increased social standing or status. If you’re present in the dream but someone else is queen, especially someone you know, you may be expressing repressed envy for that person, or more specifically, qualities that this person embodies that make them fit and right to be a queen. (Your Dream Interpretation)

The Pet Shop Boys on their Very album had a song called “Dreaming of the Queen.”  I realize now that the title and most of the lyrics were intentional, that they had used the parable of meeting both Queen Elizabeth and Princess Diana, using dream sequences like being in the nude (I thought it might have been an Emperor’s New Clothes reference, but we’ve all had dreams about being naked in situations that didn’t warrant such an outfit).  Even the song itself was about waking up from a dream, inconsolable that love had died.

This song was written over 23 years ago.  The album made a huge impact on me, personally, in the spring and summer of 1994.

This was the last time the Rangers won the Stanley Cup.

The album framed my first year of college, and was rounded out by Princess Diana’s tragic death as I was about to start my senior year.

Both the Rangers and Diana had an enormous impact on my life, and two events that I often intertwine with those life events.  (Think of when Kennedy was shot, or where you were on 9-11).

As it all ended yesterday…I was at a bachelorette party, for one of my best college girl friends.

Fitting, as though one chapter of life was beginning, another one was ending for the New York Rangers.  And it all started when I was in college.

It was appropriate, in my opinion, given how the year would pan out.

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Then carriages arrived
We stood and said good-bye
Diana dried her eyes
and looked surprised

For I was in the nude
The old Queen disapproved
but people laughed and asked
for autographs

I’ve been prepared for several months that they would not be out of the first round alive this year.  While I felt I was mostly being facetious and at best, putting up a defense mechanism for the team performance, I didn’t think they would go without at least the most minimal of a fight.

Even we saw signs back in November, when my gal pal, Tracey, and I went to a Rangers game.  I buy a few tickets from NotJeffGorton each year, and this was my first game of the year.

It was a few weeks after the Mets had lost the World Series.  I was still feeling the sting, but the Rangers and Seahawks were doing well.  It was a bunch of good distractions, to say the least.

The Rangers were actually doing pretty well at the time.  There were weird things going on in this specific game.  Rangers were hardly taking any shots.  Refs were calling penalties on imaginary fouls.  Tracey and I were having fun being snarky bitches, making comments a la Statler and Waldorf in the stands.

The Rangers ended up winning, definitively that game.  However, a Rangers blogger made a comment, basically about how the Rangers didn’t win enough for his liking.  That somehow, a 3-0 win in a game where they were getting called left and right on penalties wasn’t enough.

I started laughing.  Like come on, dude.

I do remember that same person in February commenting during a Rangers struggle stretch, saying that “he knew they were *this* bad back in November.”  To which another smart ass hockey fan responded about him being a hockey hipster, “I knew they were bad before anyone else did.”

It was funny.  But maybe, just maybe, the hockey hipster was onto something.  Usually, those hipsters, even if it’s not popular opinion, can see things the rest of us cannot.

No one likes being naked in public.  We try to wear clothes, even in the hottest of situations, but the Rangers’ uniforms were exposing a some very weak links.  And they were slowly but surely being exposed.

I remember this was also around the time I started to say, they’d be eliminated in the first round of the playoffs.

Just because I was prepared for it didn’t mean I was ready.  It still stung.

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