The Stanley Cup playoffs started on Wednesday. For countless folks around Prince George - and indeed across North America - that made Tuesday night hockey pool night.
In small or large groups, hockey fans were gathered around dining room tables or linked via the Internet, making their picks, talking trash and anticipating the cash payoff that was sure to come their way. Every team, after all, looks like a winner on draft night.
Some hockey watchers were still basking in the warm glow of regular-season pool victories.
For many people, hockey pools have become just as important as the games themselves. Yes, the final scores are top-of-mind, but 'poolies' are equally concerned about how many points they got from Sidney Crosby or Ryan Getzlaf.
While hockey pools bring with them the potential for financial gain, they have another value altogether: they connect friends with friends and family members with family members, often melting away thousands of kilometres of geography.
Then there's the pool that has been run annually for 33 years by Prince George's Gary Samis. His is something special because not only has it tightened relationship bonds, it has become a way to pay tribute to lost loved ones and has evolved into a family tradition that has stretched across generations.
During the 2013-14 NHL regular season, Samis's pool had 105 entrants from across Canada and into the United States. The winner, Scott Risebrough of Calgary (no relation to former NHL player, coach and general manager Doug), picked up a cool $650 for his victory. Others in this year's pool included former NHLer Darcy Rota and his son Adam, Prince George Cougars general manager Dallas Thompson, Cats head coach Mark Holick and local real estate agent Ken Goss.
Back in the 1980-81 NHL season, the inaugural pool had seven participants - or founding fathers, as Samis calls them. They were Samis himself, his dad George, brother Verne, uncle Paul Rocque, cousins Tony and Greg Rocque and a workmate, John Yome. In the early years of the pool, draft day was a highly-anticipated event.
"Everybody always looked forward to it," said the Vancouver-born Samis, who was living in Calgary at the time and always made sure he was wearing his beloved Canucks jersey while he was making his picks. "It was exciting. We'd always do it on a Sunday afternoon at my place. I'd have a board set up and everybody would bring a few pops and stuff. From there, when the stats went out, we'd all be able to banter about each other. We had quarterly pools that had bragging rights that went with them and [the pool] just kept the interest level for the whole hockey season."
Samis - newspaper spread out before him, with calculator and pencil in hand - used to do the stats himself and send updates via snail mail every 10 games.
Pool participation expanded from the original seven, to 10, and eventually to 16. Growth happened in the usual way - with members inviting their friends and relatives to get in on the fun.
In the mid- to late-1990s, the pool started to boom, thanks to the ease of circulating invitations via e-mail. Participants now selected their players out of groups put together by Samis on Microsoft excel spreadsheets. Samis - the self-dubbed 'Commish' - has used that format ever since.
About a dozen years ago, after Samis's uncle passed away from cancer, the pool became known as the Paul Rocque Memorial NHL Hockey Pool.
Then, in September of 2010 - just five months after George Samis had claimed first-place prize money in the pool - he also lost a battle with cancer. His son, the Commish, promptly re-named the 2010-11 edition in his honour and it has been known as the George Samis Memorial NHL Hockey Pool ever since.
For Gary Samis, attaching his dad's name to the pool brought out the emotions. But, it was the natural thing to do.
"It was some way of recognizing him," Samis said. "He was an avid Canuck fan and he was avid about the hockey pool and I thought it was fitting that this became his pool."
Prior to George's passing, there were four generations of Gary Samis's immediate family in the pool. Now, there are three, represented by Gary himself, his son Ryan, and his grandsons, Jake and Thomas. Other members of the Samis clan who were involved this year were Verne and his son, Jordan.
Rota, by the way, is one of Gary Samis's childhood friends. The two of them played together for the Prince George Texaco Chiefs, a club that won a midget provincial championship in 1969-70.
Rota, a Prince George Sports Hall of Fame member who skated in the NHL for the Chicago Blackhawks, Atlanta Flames and Vancouver Canucks, finished eighth in this year's pool, not high enough to get into the year-end money. In fact, Rota got shut out altogether while his boy, Adam, pocketed $100 for winning the second-quarter segment (games 21 to 40).
"[Adam] beat him in the quarterly pool and I just razzed him something awful: 'Your 18-year-old son has got more on the ball than you do,'" Gary Samis said with a chuckle. "He took it well. There was good banter back and forth."
Samis, a 62-year-old retiree who does financial consulting on the side, hopes the hockey pool continues for decades to come.
"That's what I'm trying to do is pass it on to future generations so we can keep a bit of a legacy going," he said.
In the long run, that's worth a lot more than any amount of prize money.
