It Had Its Pluses and Minuses: by Patty

Five Things I Didn’t Love About this Season

5. The stubborn insistence by Versus and NBC to use Pierre McGuire and Mike Milbury for color analysis. Or whatever it is they were supposed to be doing. I’m not even sure.

4. Detroit won it all. This was my worst-case scenario for the Stanley Cup. I’m sure everybody was getting sick of my whining about it, but too bad. It was awful.

3. All of March. Schnookie and Pookie already knew that March was fraught with danger, but I just blithely waded into it thinking the Stars’ blazing February would just keep rolling. It was a record-breakingly terrible month.

2. Chris Pronger got away with (attempted) murder. He stomped on a Canuck’s foot with the razor-sharp blade of his skate — an act that got Chris Simon suspended for 30 games — and got suspended for eight games. And that was the League’s SECOND idea. The first plan was to call it an accident and hope nobody checked it out.

1. My beloved Philippe Boucher spent almost the whole season on the IR. First, he had surgery on a shoulder that was injured in the previous playoffs, then injured his other shoulder in his fourth game back. Then just a few games into this year’s playoffs, he tore a hip flexor. I know it just broke his heart not to be playing. I missed him terribly all year.

Five Things I Did Love About this Season

5. The Dallas Stars had the honor of sending the Ducks home in the first round of the playoffs. I just cannot overstate how satisfying that was.

4. I started my own blog. I was sure I’d give up on it after two or three posts. I wasn’t kidding about that at the time. I was sure. Now I’m pushing 200 posts and I am really looking forward to the summer when I can go nuts without having to work in a game recap every other day. Writing the blog has taught me a couple of things about myself. One, that I really do love the Stars. Maybe even more than I thought. And two, that I have my own style of writing and there’s just no sense in fighting it any more. One of the reasons I started it was to relieve my family and friends and co-workers of having to listen to me ramble about hockey, and for the most part it’s actually worked. Now I just ramble about blogging. I’ll let them tell you if that’s any better.

3. Hanging out at IPB all season was a special kind of fun. I never knew there were such intelligent and hilarious people out there that just wanted to talk about hockey with me. It was like being a new hockey fan again. It was new and exciting to talk about different teams and players and conferences. And gardens and knitting. And the MSM and turtles-of-affairs and Katamari and fake mustaches and movies and hockey.

2. I loved everybody on this team. Including the coaches. Including the GM that was fired and the two GMs that took his place. There have been many seasons where I’m highly annoyed by at least a player or two (Bill Guerin), or even downright infuriated (Claude Lemieux). But this year there weren’t any that I didn’t like. Every single player endeared himself to me in his own special way.

1. The Playoff Run. It probably doesn’t seem like a lot from the outside, but getting to the Western Conference Finals was a pretty big deal for us. We’d been beaten down by early exits for a long time and even when the Stars played great against Vancouver in the first round last season, they still lost. That, plus the nosedive in March, set the Stars up to be the underdogs in every series. Yet they knocked out the reprehensible Ducks, and kicked out the Cup-darling Sharks. Then, down three games to none against the hated Red Wings, they still didn’t give up — they got two more wins before losing to the eventual champs. I can’t wait to see if they can top that.