Five Things I Loved About The ‘07-’08 NHL Season:
1. The way Pando’s season was going before he got injured. For a couple of glorious months before suffering a debilitating shifted-bits injury, Jay Pandolfo was a bona fide scoring threat. He was a beast! I didn’t care that it was contract-year witchery making it happen — life had never been so grand for PandoNation, and his unprecedented scoring tear was capped off with an honest-to-goodness hat trick. From Pando! Seriously! It doesn’t even seem real now. Man, those were good times.
2. Our road trip. We went on a week-long hockey road trip in October, hitting Buffalo for a Sabres/Leafs game, then swinging to Pittsburgh for Devils/Pens, then back to Buffalo again for Sabres/Blue Jackets. I’d talk all schlockily about how much fun we had meeting up for the first time in person with Katebits and Heather, but I’m trying to stick with hockey for my list of five here. And the thing is that hockey road trips are always fun, but this one featured two of the wildest games of the year (and one dreadfully dull trapfest, even by Devils-fan standards) and a helter-skelter itinerary that had us racing from city to city at a frantic pace; it was a fantastic adventure for us, and stands as one of the highest high points of the year.
3. Cat carrier Zach. Even the most casual reader of IPB will know that Pookie and I are big into the elaborately-conceived fictional characters we spin for our favorite hockey players. The one who has most captured our flights of fancy is Zach Parise, and he’s become our favorite target for goofy mocking. During one mid-season game, Mike Rupp, Arron Asham, and David Clarkson were all in the penalty box — the three guys we’ve joked Zach employs as his henchmen. With none of them available to skate, and the game getting chippy, Pookie suddenly cracked that Zach would refuse to take the ice. This rapidly escalated into our imagining the coaching staff trying to push him off the bench, while a hysterical Zach digs in with his arms and legs on the boards and stanchion, stiff-limbed like a cat that refuses to get into its cat carrier. I don’t remember anything else about that game except that it was the hardest I laughed all season. And now all we have to do to crack each other up is hold our arms out in front of us like we’re frantically pushing against the boards; I frequently will crack myself up just thinking about it. Hockey’s all about the silly for me, and cat carrier Zach was as silly as it got this year.
4. The day the Devils first hit first place. The Devils started the season like such absolute, unheard-of poop that Jersey fans had to scramble to suddenly alter their expectations. After a decade and a half of excellence, the team was looking decidedly lottery-bound. But then something really strange happened — they reeled off nine straight wins while everyone else in the East managed to lose, and before we knew it, our underachieving, lousy, misbegotten team was — GASP! — in first place in the conference. Yeah, yeah, they didn’t hang on, and finished the season with a soul-killing whimper, but for a few delicious weeks, they gave us the opportunity to be giddy with regular-season excitement.
5. The Devils’ crazy-assed D-corps. There was never a single moment in the entire season where I had even a modicum of faith in the Devils eight-man (and then nine[!!!]-man) blue line, but you know what? I still loved those goofy kids. Most of them had no business being in the NHL, but even when it seemed like the back half of our roster was being held together by duct tape and baling wire, there was something hilariously ragtag about them. It was kind of a season-long experience not unlike the time our two ragdoll kittens pooped on my bed — I was literally spitting mad, but they were just too darn cute to stay mad at. In the long run, I wouldn’t mind if Sheldon Brookbank, Mike Mottau, Andy Greene, et al, will stop figuratively pooping in my bed, but still. They’re our crazy-assed D-corps! What can I do about it?
Five Things I Didn’t Love About the ‘07-’08 NHL Season:
1. The unbalanced schedule. I can trace almost every single thing I didn’t like about this hockey season back to the unbalanced schedule. It was the root of all Evil.
2. The shootout. I hit rock bottom this year with the shootout, and realized that, purely on account of the shootout, I’m a lot closer to not being an NHL fan at all than I’ve ever been. You know how sports fans will have stock reasons why they don’t watch a particular sport? Like, “Oh, I hate free throws, so I don’t watch the NBA”, or, “I hate the DH, so I don’t watch AL baseball”? I can see myself being a person who says, “I don’t watch the NHL because they have shootouts.” I really, really, really don’t want to be that person.
3. The Devils first-round matchup. I’m not getting into it again. Just… no.
4. Sid being hurt. I want my hockey seasons to be brimming with Sidness, not brimming with Ty Conklin!
5. My own bad attitude. I was a Cranky McCrankypants about pretty much everything all year, and my grouchiness finally reached a point where it was self-perpetuating. On the bright side, though, it’s something I can control, unlike Sid’s ankle sprains.
Cat Carrier Zach is making me fall on the floor. I can just picture his teammates trying to force him over the boards. I wonder if they had to resort to turning him around the other way and putting him out there tail-first.
I wonder if they had to resort to turning him around the other way and putting him out there tail-first.
HAHAHAHAHA!!!
Or, worse, the tried and true “Pillowcase Method”.
Oh, Cat Carrier Zach is prepared for tail-first. They have to put him in a pillow case and throw him out on the ice before he realizes what’s happened.