Evolving Hockey Podcast · Evolving Hockey Staff

Episode 171: The Olympics!

·1 hr 15 min·4 clips

The Swedish team set up a camera at the hog line to catch Canada touching the stone twice.

Sean opens the show by checking in with Josh and Luke Youngren, who have been mainlining the Olympics for a few days. They’re watching live events on Peacock when they can and replaying the rest, so the whole conversation feels organized around whichever medal event is closest. Curling becomes the perfect sidecar sport. It can stay on while a hockey game is happening, then get picked back up later without much trouble. Hockey does not work that way. They make the plain point that you cannot really pause a hockey game halfway through the second period and expect the momentum to survive intact. From there the episode starts wandering, which is pretty much the setup. Sean gets pulled into a memory of old bus rides and the sense that some childhood routines just went on forever. Basketball comes up as something he genuinely did not enjoy. The conversation then turns to school-level talent, or the lack of it, and Sean says he never played an instrument beyond the recorder they forced on everybody in fourth grade. He says he was no good at art either, or music, while Josh and Luke describe themselves as the opposite. One of them still has a watercolor from second grade that he thinks is weirdly good. The logo chat is the sort of joke only a long-running panel can make. An Excel sheet and an R graph get treated like cousins. Eventually they pull the conversation back toward winter sports. They want to watch the women’s monobob final. The biathlon gets a mention too, because naturally it does. Near the end, Sean suggests they may need to take a break and come back to hockey later, which is basically the episode’s operating system. They talk about possibly doing the next show in the morning with coffee if the Olympics keep running them ragged, or after sleeping until 5 p.m. The closing promise is simple: they should be back next week to talk about the Canada gold medal.

As heard by us

An Olympics-heavy hangout that keeps drifting into hockey, curling, and familiar small-panel digressions.

This is an Olympics-heavy hangout, and it keeps circling back to hockey and curling with a kind of practical sense. Hockey gets the main screen, curling stays on the other one, because curling can sit in the background and hockey really cannot.

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Why you'd press play

For when you want Olympics chatter from people who are clearly watching a lot of it.

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