Well, now that the Ducks have officially “made a series” of this Stanley Cup Final, or whatever, and now that the League has weighed in on the Pronger hit, and now that we’re sitting down with some daiquiris after some hard, rain-soaked hours laboring as gentlewoman farmers, it’s time for IPB to start grappling with some ugly truths.
Ugly Truth #1:
The Ducks are no better than they ought to be. Or whatever it was crotchety old men used to say about “loose women” in ’50s TV shows. Thanks to how badly we wanted to see the Senators get shellacked, we were willing to blind ourselves to the fact that the Ducks are really no better. In a season that was all about the new NHL, with its charm, and its spunk, and its “isn’t this so much better than things used to be?” attitude, the Ducks were out on the Left Coast gooning things up and generally being a group of thuggish asswipes. But we could all ignore them because their games start at the ungodly hour of 10:30 PM Eastern, and, frankly, it’s just easier to try to pretend Brian Burke isn’t really still involved with the NHL. But the evil architect of the infamous Bertuzzi Incident also managed to stumble onto possession of a team that is wicked good at hockey, despite all his efforts to make them otherwise, and here they are, the nearest thing resembling the forces of Good against the soulless, rapacious, holier-than-thou Senators. Unlike last season’s Final, where there the real winner, whatever the outcome, was the fans, this year’s SCF is a lose-lose, and last night’s game just reminded us of that.
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