Back from the Olympic Break, Part 1

Before I go on obsessively about ice hockey and Sidney Crosby's corruptible angel bee-stung pucker, I just wanted to ask, didn't The Brand look completely AWESOME for two weeks? Every time I turned on the TV, there we were! Even Stephen Colbert wore us head to toe the entire Olympics! Unfortunately, most the rest of the world apparently thought so, too, because that groovy little moose cap sold out over the first weekend of the games. Snooki-wahh!

Back to business...

So admit it. If you never watched a hockey game in your life, you were tuned in on the last Sunday in February. And if you were one of the five people in America who weren’t watching USA-Canada gold-medal hockey, you missed one of the best hockey games ever. Even though we didn’t win the gold medal, Zach Parise won the “Play with the Most Heart” for creating the cheer heard ‘round the world at 19:36 of the 3rd period. And finally, after waiting for the entire Olympic tournament, we got to see the Sidney Crosby I’ve known and loved for the past few years, at the right moment, doing what he does best…flicking it past Ryan Miller with a wrister that completely silenced the bar where I was watching and winning the gold medal for Canada.

We won’t talk about how silly drunk I got on Lansdowne’s $3 Labatt’s drafts while taking rafts of shit for wearing a Penguins Crosby t-shirt. Let’s just say that Roni and I were handed a tab for 36 bucks at the end of the night, which means we drank an awful lot of beer. So let’s leave that, Crosby’s gold-medal shot, and Monday’s hangover, for the record books, and move back to regular season play, which resumed on Tuesday night.

Tuesday, March 2
Buffalo Sabres at Pittsburgh Penguins

On a hunch, figuring the League would want to capitalize on a post-Olympic hockey high, I flip to the 430-something channel and discover that woohoo! the NHL network is back on for a free preview. So I totally get to see the first game back, which I’m completely psyched for, as we’ll not get to see the hero of Team USA, Ryan Miller, in the house of the Man Who Beat Him, Sidney Crosby.

So the Pens have a little ceremony before the game, complete with cornball NBC Olympic music, introducing all the Olympians in the house. Wow, there are something like 11 Olympians in the Igloo. Five Penguins players – Sidney Crosby and Marc-Andre Fleury (Canada), Brooks Orpik (Team USA), Evgeni Malkin and Sergei Gonchar (Russia) and five Sabres players – Ryan Miller (Team USA), Jochen Hecht (GER), Henrik Tallinder (SWE), Toni Lydman (FIN) and Andrej Sekera (SLO) and Coach Lindy Ruff.

It’s all pretty cool, except there’s apparently been no FSN producer coordinating with the players, so we get crappy static headshots of some players, a shot of Ryan Miller standing in the shadows until a spotlight can find him, at which point the crowd goes apeshit crazy, chanting “USA! USA! USA!” Miller, still looking incredibly bummed, looks like he wants to cry. Marc-Andre Fleury looks sheepish (“Hey, I got an Olympic gold medal for not playing one minute of hockey!”), and when they show a replay of Sidney Crosby’s winning goal, the Pittsburgh crowd actually boos – loudly. Cut to a lonely and exhausted-looking Crosby standing at center ice with a spotlight on him, at which point the boos are sort of overtaken by cheers (“He’s our hometown hero! But he beat our COUNTRY! BOOOOO! YAAAYYYY!). He may be able to tune out the ubiquitous “Crosby Sucks!” chants every time the Pens are on the road, but to be booed – even in replay -- in his own arena seems to hurt his feelings.

As for the game? Well, let’s hope the Pens are coming back strong from the break, as they went into it having lost 3 out of the 4 games beforehand. Not to worry. We get a good, solid back-to-normal, nothing-to-see-here NHL game, including Sergei Gonchar’s 200th career goal, and the debut of Jordan Leopold, who was acquired in a trade on Monday, from the Florida Panthers (I’m sure he’s pleased to be coming north to the ‘burgh; would you be upset to be traded from a 25th-place, no-playoff-hope team to the 4th place, current Cup champion team playing with arguably the best player in the league?) Oh, and Fleury sat out this game (the Flower must have been tired from his Vancouver exertions. I kid the Flower! I love the Flower!), giving us a chance to see backup goalie Brent Johnson in his Led Zeppelin mask.

The Pens are mightier than the sword.

Penguins 3 – Boston 2