I was a reluctant hockey mom. Here's how my disdain for the game turned into pride

This First Person column is written by Jocelyn Crocker, whose son plays hockey in Edmonton . For more information about CBC's First Person stories, please see the FAQ .

It's December and I'm in a chilly Okotoks, Alta., arena, watching a sport that I've hated since I was a kid and I'm sobbing. No one is more surprised than me that I'm shedding tears of joy.

I am at a hockey tournament and my 11-year-old son Francis has just won the "heart and hustle award" for playing his best ever game, and as a result, the final shreds of my long and determined dislike of hockey have melted away. 

Growing up in Edmonton, hockey was never my family's thing. My parents chauffeured my sister and I to art classes and musical theatre rehearsals instead of practices and tournaments. On weekends, we watched episodes of Star Trek, not Hockey Night in Canada. In our home, icing was applied to cakes, shoot-outs belonged in Western movies and periods were put at the ends of sentences. 

Despite (or perhaps in spite of) its cultural significance, I continued to avoid hockey as an adult. I lived on Whyte Avenue, an entertainment district where there were many hockey viewing parties, in 2006 and it was impossible to ignore the fact that the Edmonton Oilers were in the Stanley Cup finals.

I knew the outcome of the games based on the honks and roars that reverberated through the thin walls of my rental unit but I was not caught up in the excitement. The opposite, actually. I was genuinely baffled as to why a game would matter so much to so many people when it seemed like a colossal waste of time, money and teeth. 

I am now a professional nerd. I'm the chair of the physics department at an Edmonton post-secondary institution and a few