Another Sunday night, another woolgathering session (now with less wool!).
1. One of the most appealing aspects of watching sports, for us, is that it affords us the chance to see human beings excel in acts of individual and team greatness. We’re not athletic ourselves, so it’s hugely compelling to watch people who are, people who perform feats of amazing physical skill. And in our conscious lifetimes we’ve seen all manner of greatness, on all levels of competition. Nothing we’ve seen before has been on a par with the experience of having Marty Brodeur’s career play out on our team. We are immeasurably lucky to have become Devils fans when we did, and as he — ho-hum — hit the 40-win mark for the seventh time on Saturday, we’ve simply run out of words to describe him. It just… Marty. Thank you, Hockey Gods, for giving him to the Devils, and for bringing the Devils to us when you did.
2. Spring is in the air. Pookie saw forsythias in bloom on her drive to work on Friday, Schnookie put her winter coat in storage a week ago, and we killed time between games today by watching the Indian Wells tennis tournament. Along with these signs of the seasons changing comes the giddiness of knowing the Playoffs are really right around the corner. This time of year, though, that corner helpfully blocks our view of all the nastiness that the playoff drive brings (sweating over possible match-ups, coping with the bitterness of losses, finding new reserves of blinding hatred for teams and players we’d never given two thoughts about before they beat the Devils). No, this time of year is all about the happiness, which is why we took a minute to watch some highlights from the 2000 Cup Finals. We shocked ourselves by remembering a lot (that save on Hull, that Elias pass behind the net to a perfectly placed Sykora, Nieder’s gorgeous goal) and shocked ourselves by forgetting a lot (Brylin scored? Twice? And who’s that guy wearing #7? John Madden and Colin White were once rookies? No way!). Good times, Gentle Reader, good times. We should make a habit of watching those highlights more often.
3. The one thing we really wanted to relive from 2000 was Patrik Elias wearing Petr Sykora’s sweater on the ice, and then Larry doing the same. However, we were unable to unearth any evidence of this. If anyone out there has a picture of that, we’d be eternally grateful if you’d email us at interchangeablepartsblog [at] gmail [dot] com. We might even toss in a few IPBucks to sweeten the “eternally grateful” pot.
4. These next few days are the calm before the storm. We are not excited about this “all division, all the time” crap. In case you were wondering if we’ve softened our stance on that.
