Third Down and a Shot

Only a person who is congenitally self-centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays.
E. B. White, Essays of E.B. White, Foreword, p.vii

Well? What did you expect? Good sportsmanship? The rattle and roar of that big hit in that Montreal-Boston engagement is merely synonymous of the future progress of hockey as we have never known it. It is the turning point of the Bettman administration, corporate sponsorship, death wish marketing, and a signal of the coming rattle of post capitalist society.

The Boston Bruins in hiring that monster from somewhere downstream of the Chornobyl nuclear site is only looking to the future of the game! Plus you can't lose him, the son of a' bitch glows in the dark! Now you can take a shit at the Americans all you want, but at the end of the day, they know how to conduct business. They are simply getting ready for hockey of the future. Time is money, and time waits for no one, except that poor spaz sprawled on the ice like a pretzel!

I think back to the original six, and watching the games on Saturday night, with Foster Hewitt calling the play, with the poetry and precision of the best square dance caller! The players actually looked human back then! Not like some genetically mangled refugee from Blade Runner! Back then bariatric chambers were only owned by the Navy and NASA! Every kid played hockey in a league. But I can't remember one kid in Pembroke, Ontario in the 1960's that had all new gear! Why, the only guys that got all new gear were the guys that made the Pembroke Lumber Kings!

If your old enough and have played the game, think about it...hockey back then was simply high speed ballet, with better than average eye-hand co-ordination. Today it is body armoured steroided monsters, with all the physical and ethnic requirements to be accepted in to the Waffen SS! You would  have to be legally  blind and from Canada not to see where hockey is going. 

Hockey in the future will be played on a 100 yard rink. The players will look like NFL players on skates! Weirdly enough, there are going to be about 12 guys on the ice, on each team! The Game will start, with the 12 players on each side on line at center ice. The puck will be dropped from high above...the "stick" has been replaced by a light "sabre" in the shape of a hockey stick of the past. You will still have the traditional net and the old football goal post! Is that freaking brilliant or what? They did a focus group, and the Yanks just loved it! The revenue and marketing possibilities simply cannot be ignored!

But the best thing about future hockey is "special teams"  You see, on the third down, you can kick OR shoot!

Where were you?