Snowman On Fire

Minor operational update: looks like iPowerweb, the folks who host this site and happily take my credit card payments once a year, have fixed a few of the lingering upgrade problems. For most of February and March, snowmanonfire.com couldn’t be reached by any probes, pings, aggregators, consolidators, ad displayers, or anyone else. Kind of like pucks shot by the Devils and the net. But things “feel” better. This may be the only sign of life in Boston this April. All manner of Red Sox, Bruins and Patriots jokes implied.

Perhaps this is what the Devils needed, a serious whooping at home to start the post-season. It’s happened before and the results have been fair. And the score doesn’t indicate the real balance in the game, but it does show a few breakdowns: Marty’s mishandling of the puck that led to the second Rangers goal; an inability to hit open nets; remnants of a power play that was less than 4% effective against the Rangers this year.

So much for my predictions. Elias picked up an assist, but Gomez had a playmaker’s worth. Chronic gluteal pain Avery got a goal. Vishnevski didn’t even get dressed (and Salvador looked pretty good although perhaps a bit tired in the third).

My secret plan to get home from Boston in time to watch the Devils wrap it up on April 18th is gelling. At least that’s what I’m telling myself, since everything else I’ve said, thought or fantasized appears to have the accuracy of Jim Cramer’s screaming buy on Bear Stearns.

Game One of the Hudson Hate-Fest starts in 15 minutes. Tom Guilitti’s Fire and Ice blog has some great commentary, including a stream of reader comments. Tom wants predictions, and I can’t resist being an armchair broadcaster, coach and screaming fan:

This is going to be a grind it out, long series. My predictions: it goes at least 5 games, probably 6. Rangers win one in the Rock, but the Devils humble the Rangers at least once and depose King Henrik. With all of the talk of playoff experience, doesn’t anyone remember Lundqvist’s first playoff experience against the Devils?

Bubba and I went to the Devils-Rangers game on Sunday, our first game together since January. Aside from the obvious - Devils beat the Rangers for the first and only time this season, Devils snap a 7-game losing streak against the Blue Meanies, Elias wins the game in fine style - there were a ton of little things that made the afternoon great. Most of all, though, the entire past season is not prelude to the playoffs, it’s more like the safety video on the airplane. It’s there, you have to acknowledge it, but now that it’s over the real fun begins. What happened between October and March - the highlights, the lowlights, the wonderful goals and the defensive breakdowns of Tacoma Narrows Bridge proportions is literally ancient history. It’s the second season, and we watched the Devils lay down the smelly hockey glove for a first-round brawl.

Highlights from Sunday’s trip to the Rock:

We visited Bubba’s jersey hanging outside of Section 121, in person, and got a good laugh. If you look through the men’s room sign you can spot the little snowman on the sleeve. It seemed appropriate for the quantity of bathroom humor that we enjoy.

The Devils proved they can win in the clutch. Playoff hockey is about momentum: how often does a 6- or 7-seed make it deep into May while the top seeds are done in one? Sunday’s win was required and proved more than two points in the standings.

The defense was better — not great, perhaps a bit above good — but definitely better. And “Swedish Vish” decided to gap up at the most opportune times. I hope he keeps it up through the first few Rangers games, because….

Jagr skates like my friend Goggles. We call him “Goggles” because he never looks up to pass, and hasn’t seen the inside of his defensive zone since he was in high school. We saw Jagr camped on the Devils blue line or cherry picking in the neutral zone enough to question his stamina. They shouldn’t count time on ice if you’re standing in the far blue line wondering what happened to your long, flowing hair.

Gomez showed some signs of his true playoff form, namely, bad passes in large quantities. With only 16 goals on the season (vs 13 in his last season in the proper uniform), Gomez cost the Rangers about half a million dollars a goal. Think about it: you could have Scott Gomez score you a goal, or buy a nice 4-bedroom house for the same money. When the pressure is on, he folds like a tourist in the Taj card room - at the wrong time and when the stakes are higher than he thought.

As we left the Rock on Sunday, hoarse, cheering, immune to the unseasonably cold April weather, and entering our second season of joy, we had one more reason to celebrate: the Devils won every game that Bubba and I attended this year. A perfect record, for the first time since we bought a slice of season tickets in 1999 and began cheering for some kid named Elias who had a wicked wrist shot. And now we face a horrible quandry: we wore our almost-matching Elias jerseys (Czech and Russian Superleague) to every game, and the Devils delivered in every one of those games. The Devils would like us to wear red, but second season or not, I can’t counter superstition and tradition. Elias style trumps the marketing department, in Trump style and standing up under pressure.

My friend Claire always wonders what makes us love sports so much. By “us”, of course, she means guys who have severe Claire-attention deficit problems when a game of even minor interest is broadcast over television, radio, internet, or via grunts and hand signals nearby. I’ve thought about her question for close to four years, much more so this past hockey season as each time the Devils lost, I sunk into a foul mood that even Ben & Jerry’s could not redress.

I think the answer hit me after the Devils decided not to show up in Philadelphia last Friday night. We love sports and sporting events because, for a short time, we do not distinguish between the players and ourselves. When they win, we win; when they lose, we lose and feel anguish; when they flirt with disaster our heart rate skyrockets and when disaster is averted by a goal post, poke check or shot that sails wide, we breathe easier on our way to the bathroom or beer cooler. What man hasn’t personally felt (or at least imagined) the cold ground striking the back of Charlie Brown’s head as Lucy snaps the football away from him? Even in cartoons, we time share with our favorite players.

I think this self-identification is part of the charisma that drives March Madness to ever increasing levels of public visibility. You can be a fan, an alum, or just a long-shot bettor on a school that doesn’t get so much as an ESPN Bottom Line score during an entire academic year, but once you make the Dance, everybody wants to be you if only for a little while. It’s also why all men tear up, ever so slightly, as CBS rolls “One Shining Moment.” We get to trade mental places one more time, and when the clock strikes midnight all of the Cinderellas, young and old, begin to dream of next year’s ball.

I came to this deep, Ganesh-given insight thanks to Bubba, who noticed my funk on Saturday morning. “Even if the Devils don’t do well in the playoffs,” he argued, “another season starts in the fall, all over again.” That was it. We love sports on a tribal level, wearing the colors, designs and marks of our alter egos, but we also love them on a temporal level. The seasons change - football, hockey, baseball, vacation, as the joke goes - and yet things don’t age as long as we have a fresh scoresheet, an empty stats page and an entire schedule of games to fuel our double lives.

Now that college basketball has been safely tucked away for the summer, it’s time to truly focus on the rites of spring: Passover, NHL Playoffs, and the disaster known as the Yankees bullpen.

I’m kind of baffled as to how the Devils can fail to get a single judgement call out of Toronto. First there was the goal in the Rangers game, which clearly went in off of a an arm. That’s a hand pass: the puck was advanced (intentionally or not), and it should not have been a goal. Then tonight we have a referee so far out of position away from the net that he can’t indicate whether the puck is over the goal line or not? This is just plain ugly. And these little arguments over what constitutes a goal or not wouldn’t matter if the Devils could manage to put the puck in the net a bit more often. If you’re barely holding even in a game, a weird goal is a backbreaker; if you’re finding the net somewhat more frequently then the weird goal is just plain weird.

Uglier, however, is the state of affairs on the Devils blue line. Brookbank’s play in the last few games was simply bad. He continues to be caught way off of his check, either from a forward curling from behind the net or simply not having his “head on a swivel” — basic stuff. He’s getting out-hustled, out-skated, and out-gunned. Andy Greene hasn’t been much better lately, leaving pucks laying on the doorstep like luchen kugel (a heavy noodle pudding known to sink in a pool of mercury; a favorite expression of my grandmother’s generation to mean anything that was so heavy and so slow-moving that even Brookbank could and should have caught up to it).