Opening Night... Not.

Hockey season should have started this evening, but it won't... due to yet another NHL lockout.  And you, Gentle Reader, couldn't possibly care less, unless your name is Andy, or Buck (that would be SN1... and he cares less than usual coz he's in the desert and won't see much hockey anyway), or perhaps Small-Tee.  (ed: Sarge, too.  My Bad.)  The lockout is already a month old with little or no movement in the negotiations; it looks very much like we're gonna have another lost season like we did back in 2004-2005 and that will suck mightily, epically.  So what's a boy to do?  This, in part (you should read the whole thing for a great overview of the lockout and its principals and coz it's just good writing, too):

Your mileage may vary, but my own solution is just to take the whole thing in, in its messy and horrible glory, like the moment when you're on a super-delayed airplane and you just give up and secretly enjoy the spectacle of everyone freaking out around you.¹⁰ Bask in what are sure to be monumental moments of idiocy and/or awkwardness. Revel in everyone's tendencies to blow each and every development, good or bad, completely out of proportion. Remember that this time last year, the same thing was happening with the NBA and that the situation looked so dire at one point in early October that my boss bought L.A. Kings season tickets. Make side bets. Watch more college hockey than you ever have before and feel creepy the first time you scream at some little sophomore. (Then feel creepier in four years when you're saying things like, "Dude, I watched him back when he was at Merrimack — kid's a horse!")

[...]

Go to minor league hockey: Stateside, the AHL will feature some pretty killer combinations of the league's young guys, from Sean Couturier and Brayden Schenn on the Adirondack Phantoms to Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, Jordan Eberle, and Justin Schultz on the Oklahoma City Barons. (For a fun diversion, check out some of the AHL rosters from the last lockout.) Loiter at your local rinks more than usual: Players without immediate plans have been renting ice time and existing in the purgatory of what the Minnesota Wild's Matt Cullen called a "glorified beer league — without the beer." (He was one of a number of Wild players to be shooed off the ice at a local rink the other day by a "no-nonsense, red-headed figure-skating instructor" named "Coach Marla" who wanted the ice for a private lesson with an 8-year-old.)

The lockout sucks. It sucks a lot. But at some point, it will end. You will be mad, and you will be right to be mad. You will feel that things have irrevocably changed. But a few years from now — hell, maybe even a few months — your team will come back from a shitty first half of a season to squeeze into the playoffs on the very last day, or they'll draft a bright young star who will grow into the face of the franchise, or someone will score three times in 10 seconds (or make three big saves in that span) or they'll win a big Game 7 or a Stanley Cup or a Stanley Cup in Game 7 … and whenever this finally happens, you won't be mad anymore.

That last paragraph is prolly true for die-hard fans like myself.  But, yeah... it STILL sucks.   On another note... now's the time I kinda-sorta wish I still lived in Ra-cha-cha, which is the home of a very successful AHL franchise.  There IS a minor league team near me... if you consider a two-hour drive, one way... "near."  I've actually attended a hockey game in Amarillo (back when the Gorillas were the home squad) but that was back in the day when the girlfriend served as my designated driver after a few beers.  We don't have that luxury now.

So we'll just sit here tonight and bemoan the fact that one of the few reasons I have left for living has gone AWOL.  Again.