Snowman On Fire

As Disney fave Rafiki says, “It is time.” NJYHL playoffs start in about 30 minutes for the Bantams, continuing into tomorrow morning for first-round “A” games and tomorrow afternoon for the medal round games at the “B” level. 10 months ago, we picked a team based on tryouts, coach’s evaluations of the players, and what we knew about them as athletes and sportsmen. Nobody can predict what will happen with 19 hockey players (18 young men and one young woman) over the course of a summer, except to say that in September it looked like we’d have a good, 0.500 hockey team.

A few weeks after that, they became a team. Position hockey, talking to each other, working hard every shift of every game. I believe it was equal parts talent and coaching, and most important, very little parental influence other than saying “Have a good game” every weekend. I’ve never been with a group of parents that was this supportive, fun, and good-natured, and it shows in what the kids do on the ice. Six months after our summer camp, we’re in the NJYHL playoffs, and our only hope and expectations is that everyone continues to do what they’ve done for the last six months. To badly paraphrase Robert Pirsig, the journey was more valuable than the destination.

We’re not even at the three-quarter pole of the season, and I’m getting more than seasonally affected by the Atlantic Division. The Devils squeezed out a nice win last night, showing up to play after giving up the first goal (usually not a good sign) and after allowing the tying goal in the third period. With the Flyers chronically slumping, the Penguins are choosing strategic games to lose, and a little bit of hope and faith, the Devils are indeed the Big Men on Mulberry Street. A point behind DaBurgh with a game in hand? Worth the $115 admission to the next game. A handful of points behind recently downed Ottawa? The price of a flight to Ontario on AirCanada (known in my household as “Air Can’t Aid Ya”). Smelling springtime hockey when long underwear is in style? Priceless feeling on a cold winter’s night.

Based on the wild acclaim for the high school jerseys displayed on the main concourse of the Rock, the NJ Devils asked the state’s youth hockey programs to send in representative jerseys as well. The result is a fabulous mosaic of the state’s youth players, from Ramapo to Vineland and everywhere in between.

What makes this even more exciting for us is that my son’s jersey is hanging right above the men’s room sign outside of Section 122. This is a distinction usually reserved for our namesake Howard Stern in south jersey rest areas. But now we have a little snowman on a small Devils away jersey marking a new favorite spot under a Rock.

Bit by bit, I’m recovering the roughly 170 blog entries from the V1.0 SnowmanOnFire blog that didn’t completely suck. Some sucked, but not so thoroughly as to be left to bit rot forever. At my current rate of cut and paste, as well as proof-reading, fixing broken links and adding color commentary, it will take me about 2 full weeks to repair everything.

If there’s good news in this, it’s that the new version of WordPress doesn’t seem to suffer from the spam attraction/insertion problems as the 3-year old version with which I started. Further, I’m able to add tags to posts, so you can click on a tag and see any and all related content. I desperately need to get caught up so that Google searches, external links and other cross-references work once more.

And then all dozen of my readers can breathe a collective sigh of relief, or so I would like to believe.

The ECAC has sponsored a new Coaches vs Cancer and American Cancer Society benefit called Pink at the Rink. Game-worn jerseys from all women’s ECAC teams in action this weekend and next are up for auction on eBay, and each coach has put up a game-worn tie, scarf or other piece of clothing.

You can find the “Pink at the Rink” jerseys through an eBay search (the link takes you there), or click on a team’s logo on the ECAC CvsC landing page and you can see the whole ensemble (now there’s a word you don’t see much in hockey rinks).

$150 for a game-worn jersey, with proceeds going to the appropriate cancer-related charities directly through MissionFish, is a good deal. MissionFish is eBay’s charitable giving and processing partner, and I’ve used them for the work we did last year in raising money for autism awareness through Assist From Bubba. It’s very low overhead, very fast, and a very good cause.

Whether you’re a fan of Pat Burns, Saku Koivu, or Phil Kessel or anyone else affected by cancer, you know that cancer is unerring in its bad sportsmanship and even play — anyone, anytime, any age, and any where, it leashes out. Give it a strong check — in any interpretation — right back.

Things in snowman-land are slow, and I’ve already opened a trouble ticket with the powers that be (or more correctly, the iPower that hosts this site). Looks like some database performance issues since they moved my web site to a new hosting farm. I’m learning plenty about mySQL, the database that holds all of the content, which provides a nice crossover between work and play: my employer, Sun Microsystems, is in the process of closing an acquisition for mySQL AB. Time to get smart both ways.

I’ve been thinking the same thing for the past 7 hours. It’s bad. Very bad. Like “cross the beams” bad. I attempted to upgrade the version of WordPress I’m using, but since I’m not using a nicely hosted Wordpress environment, I did it myself. Mistake. The good news is that I made a backup of the entire blog database before starting. The bad news is that I proceeded to destroy just about everything, including the URLs, permalinks and cross-references that I’ve built up for the past three years.

Bottom line: I’m going to have to piece the old blog back together, bit by bit, likely going to take a few days to get all of the old posts back, and it’s going to be weeks until Google starts finding things again.

But the Devils won, 6-1, in a night when the blue line lit the red line four times. I can tweak PHP and SQL code with a smile on my face now.

Some nights the hockey viewing stars just don’t align, or they aren’t meant to align. I found the Devils-Penguins game on the Vs network here in my California hotel, just as I was getting ready to go out for a company dinner. I saw enough of the second period to develop a fear that the Devils were reverting back to the disorganized play that led to disasters last week against teams not in the Western Conference cellar. As I went into the hotel lobby, Jordan Staal made it 3-1 Penguins, and I mentally checked out.

But thanks to the wonders of NHL Wireless, I continued to get goal by goal updates. An Elias goal to halve the gap; a Clarkson goal to tie it, and then the winner in OT. Getting these updates on the West coast often means I get two or three duplicate messages, but I don’t mind clearing the SMS backlog when the Devils win.

Lots of minor thoughts:

Elias was pissed after his penalty that led to the opening Penguins goal, and he played like someone was threatening his wine collection, manhood or both. I don’t remember seeing him play with that much fire since the Rangers playoff sweep nearly two years ago.

Oduya had a reasonable game, aside from his own penalty. Vishnevski was on for all three Pittsburgh goals, one of which caught him in the shinpad before bouncing by Marty. If you can’t help the goalie, get out of his way.

Perhaps Jay Pandolfo tried to do too much first game back — on the PK, up against a still-tough although Sid-less top Pens line — and he looked a bit out of sorts. He was also on-ice for all three Penguins goals, and didn’t take another shift after last one, with about 15 minutes left in regulation.

NHL.com now has a slick little feature that shows you the player’s name if you hover your mouse over the player number in thegame summary page.

A three-way tie for first is a good thing, especially when it could have been three points to Pittsburgh and two to Philadelphia. One some level, I feel that whatever happened around the 5 minute of the third period was a turning point, definitely in the game, maybe in the back half of the season. There’s just a huge mental advantage to winning a game in which you had to overcome a pair of 2-goal deficits, and the Devils had been on the wrong end of that one multiple times in January. The Devils earned tonight’s win on the basis of hard work. Now if we could only see that spark against the Rangers and Islanders.

Bubba and I modeled some of the international flavors of Patrik Elias at the Kings-Devils game on Saturday night. Bubba has the 2002 Czech Olympic jersey, with a completely English surname (missing the Czech accents that add color, intonation and printing costs). I’m wearing a somewhat official Metallurg Magnitogorsk Russian Super League jersey, with “Elias” on the back (in Cyrillic). Metallurg was the second team to sign Elias during the lock out year, bringing him on board for the Super League playoffs. Dave King’s book “King of Russia” has a great depiction of his year coaching the very same Metallurg team, the season after the lockout when Evgeni Malkin was his star player.

We get a lot of comments and compliments on the jerseys, which is why they’ve taken the place of our “home reds” at the Rock. And since they’re dye sublimated, without tackle twill, they clean up quite easily when they have buffalo chicken tender sauce, Carvel ice cream, mustard from a Premio sausage or soda spilled on them.

Not a reference to the Red Wings, nor a reference to some bizarre Sopranos inside joke. It’s this:

Octopus Pie is a very New York attitude online comic that mixes equal parts Sully Erna, Rachael Ray, Dorothy Hamill and Sean Avery. Seriously. It can’t be explained, so click away. But yes, I did choose those avatars so I could tag this post with “Godsmack” and “figure skating”, a most statistically unlikely skating pair. Click on the smaller image above for the full-sized desktop version.