Rats and Bleep and Bleep and Rats

I should be, right at this very moment as we speak, be checking the seating chart of the Auxiliary Press Box at the Joe Louis Arena to see from what vantage point I will be watching Game 6 of the Sharks/Wings series except for of course there is no Game 6 of the Sharks/Wings series.  So I have to go to a Music Patrons meeting at my daughter's High School which I am oh so sure will be just as entertaining as your average National Hockey League game.  Yeah, surrre.

Life sucks and then the season's over.  Most of you think the Wings season ended Saturday night when San Jose beat 'em 2-1 to take the second-round series in five, but in reality the season ended last Tuesday when the Wings, leading 3-1 with under 15 minutes to play, blew that lead and lost in overtime.  Thus, instead of going to San Jose even at two wins apiece and knowing no matter how things went Saturday night they'd be back in Detroit tonight for Game 6, Detroit was down three games to one and had no margin for error.  And then they made an error and lost the game.  So now I have to be a good father and go to the damn music meeting when I should be being a bad dad watching hockey and giving nary a thought to the Farmington High School Marching Band.

They say you win as a team and you lose as a team and that's true of all sports except for baseball where your pitcher can (and will) screw you up, football, where your quarterback can (and will) screw you up and hockey where your goalie can (and did) screw you up.  But in every other sport, it's true.  You win and lose as a team.

It was a bad goal allowed by Howard--a very bad goal--that left Game 3 tied at 3 just when the Wings were seven minutes, give-or-take, from the victory which would have put them right back in the series.  San Jose's Logan Couture just tosed it of the corner from right along the goal line and the puck caromed past Howard, a goal that an NHL goalie simply cannot allow.  I'm still not sure if Howard left open a gap between his body and the goalpost big enough to a puck to pass through (among the most elementary and thus among the worst mistakes that a goaler can make) or if, as he was going down, the puck hit one or the other of his extended knees and deflected in, but either way it was a bad goal.  Sometimes you can overcome a bad goal but sometimes, especially in the playoffs when the margin for error is so thin, you cannot.

Howard said, "It found a hole and it went in.  I'd play it exactly the same way every time."  I actually know how he feels.  I play goal myself and while I realize that saying I'm a goalie and Jimmy Howard is a goalie is essentially the same thing as saying I'm a golfer and Jack Nicklaus is a golfer, I do understand the dynamic.  There have been plenty of times when the puck has gone in behind me and I've wondered how it was possible because I had been in the proper position or I'd felt the puck hit my body or because of any of a hundred other reasons. But I am not an NHL goalie and at the NHL level, in that situation (i.e. The Playoffs), you just can't let that one go by.

But, it would be wrong to blame Jimmy Howard.  Especially inasmuch as I blame myself, personally, for the both the loss in Game 3 and for the series loss as a whole.  In the first place, I thought Detroit would beat San Jose in the series.  This is about as good a kiss of death, as solid a harbinger of doom, as you can get.  Then, in the second place, with about 8 minutes to go in Game 3 and with the Wings up a goal, Detroit was playing such sound defense that I wondered to myself if they could, or would, go the rest of the game without allowing the Sharks another shot on goal.  I don't know why I thought that.  I never think thoughts like that.  I know all about hexes and jinxes and the cruelties of fate.  But think it I did, and less than a moment later after that brilliant observation popped into my head, Couture had popped the puck into the Detroit net and we all know how it turned out.

It was Marleau from Thornton for the win in overtime last Tuesday night, just like it was Marleau from Thornton for the series-winning goal Saturday night.

And so, on to the Music Patrons meeting.  Rats and bleep and bleep and rats.

The Tigers, the focus of all our attention from now until the football season starts, host the Yankees in the first of four tonight at the ballpark here in town.  It will not go well, I'm afraid.