We’re settling in for a long night of keeping tabs on five — five! — first round match-ups. Ah, is there anything better than the first round of the playoffs, Gentle Reader? We didn’t think so either. We’ll be updating this post with our thoughts as the night goes along. We’ve seen some phenomenally awesome hockey the last few days and can only hope to see more of the same tonight!
– In a bizarre and totally unwelcome callback to last year’s Awards Show we’re getting TapOut on our HD Blersus instead of Washington-Philly.
– We tune into the Montreal-Boston intermission on CBC in the hopes of seeing Sid’s Gatorade commercial which Pookie missed last night, and are treated to Ron MacLean and Kelly Hrudey. They go all Winston Churchhill’s brick wall on us and challenge us to forget what’s wrong with it and instead focus, er, we mean F.O.C.U.S., on the positive. No matter how much Kelly has bewitched Pookie over the years with his soft voice and unrelentingly niceness, we are not convinced. This game is boring!
– Why does Blersus hate us? First no Playoff Tracker, and now TapOut is forcing us to listen to Ron and Kelly tell us there wasn’t a single player in that boring assed game playing at top form. Do they want us to stop watching hockey? Because it’s not going to work!
– We’re so excited to have Gambler joining us from Europe tonight for the early games. To celebrate her being around, we just have to share the incredibly awesome magnet she sent us from overseas. It’s topical, considering all the talk lately around the interwebs about what a whiner Marty Brodeur is. We beg to differ; Marty is most decidedly not a whiner. We do believe, however, that he’s a donut fiend.
– We’ve changed channels so many times, and with so little warning, that we no longer have any idea what game we’re watching. We think we’ve got Philadelphia/Boston and Washington/Montreal on by now.
– Now that we’re a week into the playoffs, it’s time to start assessing the state of the Playoff Goggle Hottie. We have a few early picks, including Pookie’s recent playoff-only interest in Milan Lucic. She insists, though, that he’s not hot, but rather “fascinating”.
Schnookie: “Fascinating is just a precursor to hot.”
Pookie: “Not if he doesn’t get out of this round, it doesn’t.”
– The Dallas game is not going as we would have wished, so we switch back to the Flyers-Caps. If the Caps start scoring we’ll know our good hockey karma has run out.
– What we’d hoped would be an awesome night of hockey currently has Schnookie playing Shift and has Pookie napping.
– Tonight’s hoped-for narrative has gone completely off the rails. The interesting early game was the one we didn’t want to watch (Caps/Flyers), the Stars/Ducks game didn’t go at all as planned, and midway through the second in Calgary, this is not looking like a game for the ages. What’s going on here?
– Well, if you’re a Sharks fan, this one turned out to be pretty damn good, but if you’re not… meh. We guess not every night can be as exciting as the last few have been. But we’ve got to remember — the playoffs are a marathon, not a sprint. We need to pace ourselves. Without the lulls, there’s nothing to measure the kick-ass awesome high points against, right?
