Devin Cooley stopped 34 of 36 shots as the Calgary Flames beat the Carolina Hurricanes 3-2 at the Scotiabank Saddledome on Sunday, ending the champions’ winning run and giving a team that had been bottom of the entire league its first home victory of the season.
Then he went and spoke to Sportsnet, which is the part people are still passing around. Asked how he had done it, he described a method that amounts to switching his own brain off.
“Just trying not to feel or think about anything that was about myself. I just let my unconscious brain do everything,” Cooley said. “Like, don’t think about anything, don’t have too much fun, don’t smile too much. Just shut it off, then I start making saves and I don’t even know how I made that save. And then it’s like, well, it doesn’t matter.”
The same applied in the other direction.
“Then you let up a goal and you’re like, I can’t believe I let up that goal. It’s like, it doesn’t matter,” he said. “The past is dead, there is nothing for you there.”
The reaction from supporters of other clubs tells you most of what you need to know.
“Love this guy. Hate the Flames, but hard not to be a Cooley fan,” one wrote.
“Holy s***, Calgary, I didn’t know you had such a f***ing gem of a player,” said another.
“Most likable guy in the NHL,” a third added, with somebody else going further still: “This might be the best player interview I’ve ever seen.”
Why do fans love Devin Cooley?
A month before the season started, his fiancée Natalie Weyers filmed herself walking up to his desk at home and announcing that he was “never beating the goalies are weird stereotype.” He was teaching himself linear algebra out of a textbook he’d bought specially. For fun.
Cooley turned up in the comments to explain himself.
“The goal is to see how far I can go in math before my brain says that’s enough,” he wrote. “Why am I doing this? I’m not really sure, but I guess with how good AI is getting I don’t want to lose the art of learning and creating. Plus it’s a fun challenge.”
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He also mentioned that he had dropped out of a finance and computer science degree to chase hockey, and that linear algebra was where he’d left off, so that was where he’d pick it up again.
The 29-year-old from Los Gatos, California has worked his way up through Nashville, Buffalo and San Jose to become Dustin Wolf‘s understudy in Calgary, and was the club’s nominee for the Bill Masterton Memorial Trophy, awarded for perseverance and dedication to hockey.
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