Thank you!

I hope everyone is feeling a little better today after watching the Canucks get eliminated from the playoffs last night. I am still down in the dumps and am already tweaking the Canucks roster for next season. If we can talk Gretzky out of this whole “coaching” thing and add him to the line up we will be in good shape. Combine Gretzky’s offence with a new 4 or 5 year contract we give to Bobby Orr on defence and I really like our chances.

I woke up this morning and thought about all the excitement that has happened over the past month. Between the Canucks playoff run and the goats it has been very fun. Although it only happened 6 times, it was a very special feeling each time the Canucks won a playoff game. Goats were flying left, right and centre and it felt like everybody in the city was happy. Riding on the SkyTrain or the city bus, all people were talking about were the Canucks. Everybody was everybody’s friend. Christmas is pretty good as far as “times of year” go, but aren’t the playoffs fantastic?

As a lifelong Canucks fan, I have become very familiar with comforting sayings such as, “Maybe next year” and, “Well at least…” The truth is I think every year is “our year,” but until this year I have never believed the “Well at least…” part. This year it is different. This year we can all say that at least we changed people’s lives. It may not have been the Canucks year, but it is going to be a lot of other people’s year.

Maybe it is the fact that denial is step one of the grieving process, but I woke up this morning to lots of emails from people saying that they are still buying goats. More people even purchased goat shirts this morning. Who are we kidding, the goat shirts are fashionable all year round, but it was encouraging to see that so many people are still buying goats. Hopefully Goat Canucks Goat will help make buying a goat just as trendy as wearing a chic goat shirt.

While it is encouraging to see that so many of you are still buying goats, it is not surprising anymore. When I first started the Goat Canucks Goat facebook group the goal was to buy 16 goats. When I saw that the facebook group had over 50 members in it, I could not believe it. Then it just kept growing (unlike my patchy beard). Then Darrell from www.1981.ca emailed me and told me he wants to buy a goat and make a website and things really took off. When we set the goat-o-meter to 100 we thought it was going to take a deep run in the playoffs by the Canucks if we wanted to reach the 100 goat mark. After we reached 100 goats, the goat-o-meter exploded and goats came spilling out the top. We then thought we would set the new goat-o-meter to 500 just for fun. We would have been happy to get half of that. This morning we are at 584 goats. That’s $14,600 worth of goats! No kidding! (Get it? Baby goats are called “kids.” Very funny goat joke) People are also deciding to donate more than goats. A group of seniors in New Westminster also informed me that they have decided to get together and dig a well for a refugee camp. I should make that a little clearer. Don’t worry, the group of seniors will not be doing the actual digging of the well. That is done through CRWRC. The generosity and encouragement from people has been overwhelming. We had people visit the web site from 72 countries around the world and covered every continent. Even Antarctica! Unbelievable.

I would like to say thank you to everybody who came to the web site. You have no idea how much fun it has been to read all the comments and emails from people. Except for that Chicago fan who emailed me and called Luongo a goat. Don’t worry – he was locked and banned from the web site immediately. Thank you to all of you who purchased a goat. The goats have such a great impact on people’s lives. Thank you to the media who helped give Goat Canucks Goat exposure and in turn helped more goats be purchased. It was very fun to do radio and TV interviews. Who knows, maybe a scout saw my sweet hockey moves on the news and will contact me for a tryout now! Or maybe an agent saw how cool I look with a patchy beard and will ask me to star in some movie! But probably not. Darrell Koopmans from www.1981.ca made this amazing web site and put in oodles of work for Goat Canucks Goat free of charge. He deserves a lot of credit as he is the creator of the goat-o-meter! The web site is amazing. Thank you to Matthew Beimers also put in many hours of work for Goat Canucks Goat and handled the goat shirts.

Thank you to my beautiful fiancee Jennifer, who despite my enormous beard has still kissed me, supported me and been patient with how much time I have committed to Goat Canucks Goat.

Thank you also to the Vancouver Canucks without whom this never would have happened. It has been fun cheering the team on and I am already excited about next season. Next year is definitely our year.

While it has been easy for us to buy our goats, CRWRC are the ones who are doing and will do all the work involved with making sure needy people actually get their real, live goat. Thank you very much to Kristen VanderBerg, Rebecca Combs, Christina de Jong and Ida Kaastra Mutoigo. They have put in many hour of work for Goat Canucks Goat and will continue the great job they are doing at CRWRC. For more information about CRWRC, or to donate things other than goats, you can visit their web site at http://www.crwrc.org/pages/crwrc.cfm

Due to the amount of fun and excitement we all had because of Goat Canucks Goat, it would be very fun to make it an annual event. I have no idea where we go from here, but so far it has been amazing. For now we will leave the web site up and continue to post updates.

For those of us who are still feeling down about the Canucks loss, I will leave you with this.

“Courage doesn’t always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, “I will try again tomorrow.” -Mary Anne Radmacher