Today we made the long, long trek up to The Rawk to take in all the sights and sounds of the Devils facing off for a 5:00 Sunday game. Along for the ride? Pookie’s coworker Elizabeth, a Mets fan who is considering becoming a hockey fan to help pass the offseason. We couldn’t have picked a better game to showcase all that’s great in hockey.
Just kidding!
Okay, only kind of kidding. We had fabulous seats right up close to the net the Devils shot at twice (almost exactly where our old season tickets were, actually), so the big goals all happened right in our laps, and the Senators’ goals mostly happened way down at the end of the ice that we couldn’t see, so it was kind of like they never happened at all.
We’re both terrible at seeing hockey well in person, so we’ll go easy on the game analysis here. As far as we could tell, the Devils were not great for about 55 minutes (with the exception of the Zubrus/Patty/Gio line), then Captain Fuck This Shit was reminded that his opponent was the Senators, so he took his patented Fuck This Shit move out of mothballs to tie the game up late, and then Patty kicked in when he realized it was OT, drew a penalty, set the tone on the 4-on-3, and then Rolston sent us all home happy. That’s about it, right?
So the fact that we went into the game telling Elizabeth, “The only thing you need to know is that the Senators are profoundly awful,” then kept repeating it to her every time they took the lead, is beside the point. As is the fact that the Devils were catastrophically bad on the PK. Two points is two points, and Pollyanna would say that good teams find ways to win, even when they suck.
Most of all, though, we love that we got a picture of Pando as King Of The Good Ole Hockey Game:
And when we ordered our beers (Hoegaardens), the lady manning the tap declared, “Three hos!”
Three hos. That’s us.
