The St. Louis Blues visited the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim (wikipedia article) this past Friday (game recap), and it was one of those games that gets your attention.
It reminded me of a particular Kings at Ducks game (George attended that one with me) where, in my opinion, the Ducks' season turned around, they suddenly gained confidence they'd never seemed to have before, and the team ended up marching all the way to the finals in 2002-3. They lost to New Jersey, but it was quite the season.
The Blues game was really similar. Now, I'm also a Blues fan. I've pulled for the Ducks, Leafs, and Blues for a long time, even before I actually could see the game played since Arkansas TV stations never carried it, and we didn't have cable.
My dad had an interesting theory about how people from not-so-icy places seem to gravitate to hockey. I think people just gravitate to good sports, and hockey is one of the most-perfect sports.
Anyway, the game was great fun - the Blues really did kind of blow up after they scored two early goals. The penalties ate them alive, sure, but even with even-strength, the Ducks just looked great. By the end of the first period, the Ducks had had 23 shots on goal to the Blues 8. It stabilized a bit in the second, then the Ducks went back to playing more like the wide-open gangbusters game of the first.
This time of the year is always a slightly bizarre time in sports. You have baseball's finals going on, hockey has just started, I think football is still going on (bleh), and if they started the NBA season a couple weeks earlier, you'd have every major sport competing for attention. That would cause, I'm sure, some sort of mental breakdown for people that like all those sports.
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