We love these playoffs, we really do. Honest. Cross our hearts and hope to become Rangers fans die. We’ll be happy when any one of the four teams still playing wins the Cup, even the Vegas Tranny Bride Flyers (if you can call what they’ve been doing the last three games “still playing”. And if you consider the Stars “still playing”, too). That said… there’s just nothing to say. The playoffs as they stand right now are perfectly cromulent and we’re perfectly content with them. However, contentment doesn’t put blog posts on the table. Happiness does, though, and so we’re setting our Playoff Goggles to “Time Machine” mode and are turning our sights to the season past. It took us an entire hour-long pizza lunch to find five things we really truly enjoyed about this season but find five things we did. Today we present Day 3 of our five day mini-series, “NHL 07-08 Regular Season: Through a Lens Playoff Goggle-ly”.
Day 3: Ottawa Senators
It’s really been beaten to death this Spring, but we can’t help but revisit the hilariously epic collapse of the Ottawa Senators as we cast about for things that made us happy during this past season. There’s nothing more annoying than having to hear about how amazingly good a team you don’t like is, and it’s doubly annoying when you know, in your heart of hearts, that said team just isn’t that good. It’s triply annoying when the team ousted your team and your secondary team and your tertiary team in the previous year’s playoffs. We knew the Senators weren’t that good when they beat Pittsburgh, then we knew they weren’t that good when they beat the Devils, and then we knew they weren’t that good when they beat the Sabres. Yet for some reason, many in the hockey world decided to overlook the “Wow. This team just isn’t that good” flameout the Sens experienced in the SCF and anointed them one of the all-time greats when they reeled off an astonishing record in their pre-Thanksgiving games. When the wheels finally fell off, we couldn’t have been more delighted.
No, wait, we could be more delighted! Because, Gentle Reader, there’s more! What the Ottawa Senators and their fawning supporters forgot to factor in when the season began was The Curse Of Beating Brodeur. Everybody likes seeing an overdog fail, but it’s that much sweeter to see it happen when you know it’s the black magick of your own team that’s haunting them. We’d try to reassure Senators fans that the worst is over, but previous Brodeur-cursed teams have included the seven-years-out-of-the-playoffs Rangers and the two-years-and-counting-out-of-the-playoffs Hurricanes. For all we know, the Ottawa Senators are going to be the gift that keeps on giving (to non-Sens fans, that is) for years to come!
