We’re three weeks out from the Oilers’ first pre-season game and I’m excited

Happy Sunday, everybody! I hope you’re having a lovely start to your long weekend and doing your best to handle the heatwave without melting. And since I’m hanging out by the AC today, I thought it would be fun to pop onto the site and talk about how excited I am that we’re only three weeks away from the Oilers’ first pre-season game. Three weeks, can you believe it?

When I looked at the calendar and realized that we’re only three weeks away from the first tune-up game of the year, I actually found myself getting fired up about the idea of watching the pre-season. Me, excited for pre-season hockey? It cannot be. Normally, I couldn’t care less about these things but after the way the Oilers just wrapped up their 2021-22 campaign, I’ve started to get the itch for something to watch and the only prescription to fix the problem is Connor freakin’ McDavid. At this point, it feels like it’s been an eternity since I’ve watched him do his thing and it’s nice to realize that we’re only a few short weeks away from remedying the issue.

Even though I already know that the pre-season is eventually going to annoy me with its two-week length and bore us all down the stretch while we wait for the real show to start, this is the first time I’ve actually been counting the days until go time. This is also the first time I can remember that I’ve actually considered buying tickets to watch the boys start to work the kinks out. I miss the rink, I miss the boys, I miss everything about game days, and that has me seriously considering ponying up the dough to get into Rogers Place. Maybe it’s because the off-season Kool-Aid is going down smoother than normal or something, but I can honestly say that this is as fired up as I’ve been in quite some time.

Outside of the normal hope and excitement that comes with a new season, I legitimately believe that the Edmonton Oilers are a force to be reckoned with in 2022-23 and that’s a feeling I don’t know that I’ve ever had before. I mean, for as long as I’ve been Baggedmilk, we’ve always hyped up the new NHL season as if it would be the one where the Oilers would turn the page, but this time around, there are honest-to-goodness reasons to believe it. With the two best players in the world in our lineup and a forward group that’s as deep as we’ve seen in this website’s existence, how can you not get on board with the idea that something special is going to happen?

Now that the pre-season is only three weeks away and the boys are starting to roll back into town, these next few weeks are going to fly by, and before we know it, we’ll be cheering for our new pre-season champ and picking out early candidates to be The Answer. Even though the pre-season won’t provide much excitement in terms of what we see on the ice, it does mean that the real dance is only a short hop away, and that’s enough to get my Oilers fan heart pumping.