So we’ve pretty much ignored all the post All-Star Weekend media coverage today, because it always makes us feel so very low to hear the bitching about how “meaningless” the game is, and to listen to the hockey media yammering on about what changes could be made to make the game “matter” more. You know what? It’s an All-Star Game. The point is that it doesn’t matter. In this interweb driven age of sports news, though, there always has to be something significant happening all the time, because information on its own isn’t currency anymore, so heaven forbid the media muckety-mucks should just be reporting for a day that something fun happened. We spend all season, from right out of the gate, hanging on every point, slavering over the standings, drawing the “Top Eight” lines across the conferences, and assigning grave importance to every game every day. Well, we just spent a weekend watching exhibition hockey that gave us a chance to relax for four days and forget about the clusterfuck that is the Atlantic Division standings. We spent a weekend watching players we normally dislike getting to show off (and win us over) by goofing around out of their loathed-team contexts. We spent a weekend just not spazzing about how frickin’ meaningful the NHL likes to try to make us believe it’s supposed to be all the time. We watched players in their suits, with their helmets off, laughing and relaxing on the ice, and it made us relax and laugh, too. And you know what? That’s pretty damn meaningful, too. No, we won’t remember the final score a year from now, and we won’t remember who was the MVP, but we will remember that it was fun. Since when did “fun” not matter?
That said, we can’t help but break All-Star Weekend into who won and who lost.
WINNER Us.
That is if we get a VERSUS VERSUS VERSUS magnetic playoff tracker board.
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