Laugh

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- This made me happy. Via Behind the Jersey, a couple of videos brightened my morning and helped ease the tension of this heavily anticipated Game 6. Thank you, Author Of That Site Who Has No Idea Who I Am. (The creators of the videos themselves have a bunch of others, all of which are hilarious. Search "knob hockey" on YouTube and set aside like a half hour, if you haven't seen these videos already. It's worth it.)

- Mike Babcock tells Pens coach to eat shit and die. Or at least, in an encoded, passive-aggressive hidden meaning kind of way. It was awesome regardless. I love the Babcock.


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The Wings will take their second crack at the Cup tonight. Hopefully overtime won't be involved.

Now that I've had some time to calm down from the impossibly wild Game 5, here are my actual, level headed thoughts on the game as well as what we'll see tonight -- of which I will compare to my I Hate Sports post that followed Game 5 much too soon and should have been filed under the pseudonym of "Chicken Little".


"Losing a game THIS way -- when you can end it any number of times like we could have -- is worse than having your season ended in OT."

That's going a little overboard, and is a prime example of why you don't post shit after a bad loss. It's not good for anybody. It makes you look stupid and say things you don't mean, and it makes you call your mother at 3:30 in the morning and ask her why she did something so cruel as to bring me into this cold, cold world. For this, I am sorry, I guess, to our core readership who only stumble upon this page when searching for Gordon Bombay stick-handling footage and are barely compelled enough by my handy cut-and-paste job on the upper right-hand side of your screen to read maybe 30 words of my indecipherable nonsense. Translation: I just apologized into a cavernous hole of nothing.

"34 seconds ......."

First off, the correct usage of this reference is 34.7 seconds, not 34. And secondly, if I would've put the computer down for long enough to let the elements of the game marinate in my head for longer than like an hour Monday night, I would've liked to add that the buildup to the goal was much more complex than the Penguins simply scoring. After seeing it a couple of times now it's obvious that we didn't do a good job of closing that one out, Ozzie left a gift rebound, and nobody was there to pick up Talbot or the puck in time. It was somewhat of a disappointing effort, you could say. Credit the Penguins for getting it deep into the zone in the first place with enough time to do some damage.

"They had done it -- they had somehow overcome their insanely poor start, done a 180 on the Pens and were minutes and ultimately seconds away from the most memorable win of any sporting event I've ever watched as a Michigan sports fan."

In all honesty, it probably would've been. That game was fucking absurd. Game 6 and/or (no, don't say it you asshole) a possible Game 7 have less than a 1% chance of topping it. But I need to add something, and I'm saying this as a fan of the team that lost in Game 5: That was one of the 10 best hockey games I've ever seen. It had mistakes, it had flaws, it ended on a power play goal in overtime, but those flaws also created some exciting scoring chances both ways, great saves, and any time the Cup is on the line it amplifies the intensity 10 fold. Had the Wings actually scored an OT goal to win the Cup -- or even if they just held off Pittsburgh for another 34.7 seconds, this victory would be too hard to beat.

"I know it's a bit down the road, but if the Wings somehow blow this series, it will probably be the end of this blog and too much for me to handle altogether. I would probably stop watching sports if that happened. I don't think that's a joke. I would need counseling, therapy, a lobotomy, and a coke-binge just to begin thinking about starting to consider embarking on the preliminary steps of the healing process."

This is thinking in the extreme to the extreme. But I also have no idea how I would actually handle it. I've gotten over the 2000 Lions missing the playoffs on a 53 yard field goal. I've gotten over the Tigers losing the World Series. I've gotten over every other Wings postseason loss, mainly because we've had a few Cups to stifle the pain. But should the unthinkable happen, I won't know what to do. There's no blueprint on how to handle going from the euphoria of Game 5's third period to the horror of watching Crosby take the Cup from Bettman on top of the Hockytown logo. Let's not think about this.

"I think the Penguins will win Game 6."

No I don't. I'm flip-flopping all over the place, and I don't care. The Wings are the better team, period -- more depth, better defense, better coaching, and better two-way playing star players. As bad as Red Wings fans feel about Game 5, you have to think about the people who actually lost that game. The probably aren't too happy about it. And I don't think they are going to come out flat for a 4th straight game. No way. How could they? They haven't come out of the box flying in quite some time now, and they know that they need to. I hope and think they will do that tonight. Go Wings.