On the eve of the lockout we, along with three friends, were directionless, despondent and disoriented — what we were to do without hockey?! The answer came in a flip comment made by Terry Frei in a “What’s A Fan To Do?” column: form a fantasy fantasy hockey league. He meant it in a stats driven way, but we’re all writers and dreamers, so we decided to write what we thought would happen if the season would have been played. Using the 2004-2005 schedule, we divvied up the games amongst the five of us, leaving us with about 5-7 games a week (for all you math nerds, two of the original SPECTERites dropped out, but we divvied the schedule amongst the original seven). We instituted one rule: you had to give a final score for every game you were assigned; other than that, you could write whatever you wanted. Because we’re writers and dreamers what happened over the course of that year of missing hockey was a 175,000-word, 500-page masterpiece of collaborative writing. This summer we’ll be excerpting highlights from SPECTRE every Saturday. If you’d like to read the document in full, you may view it here. Be forewarned SPECTRE did not age well, and didn’t reach full steam until about Week 3 or so. We’ll be pulling out the choices bits for you to read here, and we hope you enjoy them.
This week’s SPECTRE Saturday is a smorgasbord of entries from the first few weeks.
Morgan, Week 1
October 15, 2004
Blackhawks 1
Blues 5
Keith Tkachuk continued his tradition of fast starts in nearly meaningless games by netting the natural hat trick on his first three shots against a clearly overmatched ‘Hawks team. After a time out, Hawks goalie Jocelyn Thibault donned a helmet painted to look like the Finnish flag, and Tkachuk missed the net the rest of the night. Due to more cost cutting measures by Blackhawk’s President Bill Wirtz, Chicago’s games were no longer broadcast in any media. Mr. Wirtz appeared before a crowd of Hawks fans who had read about the game in the paper and said that the game was “a lot closer than 5-1”. He then turned to an assistant and whispered, “Are they buying that?”
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