I am not a big hockey fan. I’ve covered parts of three Stanley Cup finals, the Kings-Canadiens in 1993, the Ducks-Devils in 2003 and Ducks-Senators in 2007, and found the experience interesting enough … but I generally will not make a point of watching a final that does not involve SoCal teams.

That changed tonight for Game 7 of the Boston-Vancouver series — because I was writing about it for The National.

I was up at 4 a.m., which is when the game started here in the UAE. I concede that I was groggy and perhaps even slipping back into a coma during the first period. Actually, I didn’t see the first Boston goal, live.

We have a handful of Canadians working at The National, and they had organized viewing parties. One offered “waffles and beer” for those who were willing to stay up all night for the game. (I would need to be offered cash money to stay up all night for hockey.)

I decided I needed the three hours of sleep I got ahead of the game, because if it ran all the way to 8 a.m. (here), with the postgame show … I might never get back to sleep.

It wasn’t a particularly memorable game. The Canucks seemed almost resigned to their fate, after that first Boston goal, and the Bruins pulled away … and at no point after it got to 2-0 did I think Vancouver would win because I couldn’t see them beating Tim Thomas three times in one game.

The National ran a separate story on the game, so whatever column I did would need to avoid the nuts and bolts of what happened.

It is important to review your readership when you write a lengthy piece in an exotic market like this one. Back in SoCal, I would have assumed some basic knowledge of the sport and the series and I might have spent some time on the Bruins coming back from that horrible collapse of a year ago (up 3-0 in games, up 3-0 in Game 7, still lost the series), or about Tim Thomas coming up big, or Marchand and Bergeron coming from nowhere …

But our readership skews Indian and British, and neither of those countries have any interest in hockey. None.

I got a sense of this the previous week; I came in after an off day and one of the Brits on the production side of sports asked me what I thought of the p1 photo — which was Nathan Horton out cold on the ice. I realized the next day that I was being asked to remark on how open-minded our Brit-oriented staff had been to put the NHL on the cover. Because (and this is key) as a North American, I must be a hockey fan, right?

I can see how a Briton might think that. “All the people I know who are hockey fans are North Americans, therefore most North Americans must be hockey fans.”

Actually, no; hockey fans get a bit thin on the ground in the U.S. once you get south of the Great Lakes, and I am not one of the rare breed of Sun Belt pucks fans. The thinking here would be similar to Americans assuming all Brits are rugby fans. In fact, rugby fans in Briton are concentrated in the English Midlands and Wales. At least, from what I can tell.

So, my readership … almost no hockey fans.  A high percentage who are not even familiar with the game. And we will have a game story elsewhere in the section … so I needed to come up with an idea with a much broader potential appeal.

I finally went with the idea of how hockey remains a physical sport, and how the tougher team usually wins, and pegged it to Canadian culture (they’re polite, but they’ll knock out your teeth on a hockey rink) … and then did a bit of historical stuff about how Europeans play a softer, more stylish game than do Canadians, and that maybe was the single biggest reason why the Bruins defeated the Canucks, whose best two players are the Swedish Sedin twins.

That column is here, and I was pretty much satisfied with it. Gave the game some context, and maybe a few people who don’t know the game at all managed to fight their way through it.

I never did get much sleep. A 4 a.m. start time is rough.