Tag: Sport

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How I’d fix the Bills and the NFL (but really, screw sports, anyway)

OK, I’m finally getting back to the “Gimme a Title!” game that I launched way back a couple months ago before I got all “Meh, I got a book to finish!” and stuff. I got two suggestions that were quite similar, so I’m folding them into one: I’m the new commissioner of the NFL, here’s my plan and How I’d fix the Buffalo Bills.

Well, fixing the Bills is easy. The way the NFL works nowadays, fixing any team is easy. The job involves just two steps:

1. Draft a great quarterback.
2. Profit!!!

Of course, that first step is kind of a killer. As advice goes, this is about as useful as my old college music theory professor’s chestnut, “Playing the piano is very easy. Just strike the keys in the right order and the piano does the rest.” If only!

Anyone who pays even slight attention the the Bills knows that they have not really been good at the quarterback position since Jim Kelly retired after the 1996 season. (In fact, anyone who paid attention to the Bills that year might make the case that they haven’t been good at quarterback since before that season, but that’s neither here nor there.) Why is this? Well, because they’ve made a series of epic blunders at the position. There’s no need to go into the history of it all, but suffice it to say…they’ve been terrible at the game’s most important position.

And they’ve been bad at that position in a football era in which the rules favoring offense in general and passing in particular have made the position even more important than ever before. So that’s where it starts: find a great quarterback. And how do you do that? Scout ‘em all. Draft at least one quarterback every single year until one succeeds. Lather, rinse, repeat. Be hard-nosed in your evaluations and unafraid to make deals if you need to move up in the draft, and equally unafraid to cut guys’ careers short if you have to. Two years ago, the Carolina Panthers took two quarterbacks in the draft, including one in the first round: Jimmy Clausen and Tony Pike. The next year, armed with the first overall pick, they took Cam Newton, regardless of the two picks they’d spend on QBs the year before. That’s what the Bills need to do: focus on QB with laser-like precision.

Until then, nothing else matters…except maybe linebacker. Boy Howdy, are they bad at linebacker. But once you figure out QB, then it’s easier to slot in the pieces around that guy. Let a great QB make everyone else better, instead of doing what the Bills have been doing — relying on everybody else to make the QB better.

As for the NFL in general…well, I hate to say this, but I think that my passion for football in particular and for sports in general is waning pretty severely. I find it harder and harder to enjoy football, knowing more and more that these players are doing things to their bodies which destroy their future lives — in some cases entirely, what with the increasing rate of retired-player suicides in which the victims later turn out to have suffered brain damage from repeated hits. The game’s attraction was always that it was kind of ‘cartoon violence’; sure, players got seriously hurt once in a great while, but those were freak occurrences. But it’s just harder to see it that way now, and I’m especially disheartened to hear other fans say things like “Well, they signed the contract. Nobody forced them to play football.”

Well, you know, that’s something that needs to be rethought in general in our society, I think. There are more ways to force someone to do something other than holding them at gunpoint. The lure of a huge paycheck — or, in some cases, any paycheck — can be a compelling force too, I think.

My other problem with football isn’t so much with football but with sports in general now. It took me a long time to get there, but I am increasingly of the mind that the amounts of money involved are insanely high, and that’s just going to go up. We build these palatial stadiums for teams, almost always involving public financing in some way, when it’s got to be one of the worst-kept secrets in the world that sports facilities just don’t generate large amounts of economic impact. And there’s this sense of entitlement the sports leagues seem to have, because they know that as a society, we have collectively decided that sports is one of the most important things we have.

Here in Buffalo, the community’s sports fervor has switched over the last ten years from football to hockey. Once a rabid football town, Buffalo is now a stalwart hockey city that sells out its beloved Sabres almost every single time they play. And time was when I found that exciting and fun to behold; hockey as a game is a joy to watch, and over the last few years I’ve started liking it more and more. (I never really learned the rules years ago, so I never understood it all that well, and I haven’t had too much opportunity over the last decade owing to our not having cable.) But the just-concluded NHL lockout has left a very sour taste in my mouth for the sport, to the point that for the most part, I may well be done with sports in general.

Again, it comes back to money. While my instinct in labor disputes is to always side with the folks who do the work over the people who ‘foot the bill’ (and thus profit hugely by it), it was very difficult to justify rooting for one side in this dispute over the other. It wasn’t the Haves versus the Have-nots; It was the Have-a-ton’s versus the Have-a-bit-less-but-still-more-than-I’ll-ever-see’s. At one point I heard some player talk about how this was about “how are we gonna feed our families”, and I wanted to vomit. If you gave me a single NHL player’s one-year salary, say $2,000,000, as a one-time bonus, and said to me, “This is all the money you are allowed to use to feed your family every week for the next fifty years,”, you know what? That single check would allow me to more than quadruple my current weekly food expenditures for my family. Two million divided by fifty years divided by fifty-two weeks? Yeah, I think I can feed my family extremely generously on $769 a week.

The money involved makes it harder than ever for me to maintain any kind of interest in sports, because that money’s not just coming from the sky. Nor are owners paying it out of their own personal fortunes. The teams are in business to make money, and the make it from teevee advertising and from fans who buy tickets. That’s what I find most disturbing. One refrain I hear constantly whenever any one sport suffers a labor-related stoppage is that “The owners and players will make out fine, it’s the fans who get screwed!” And yet, when the stoppage ends and play resumes, the stadiums still sell out. The Sabres just announced a record for ticket sales in a single day, for the start of a lockout-shortened season. As I said on Facebook: If this is the fans getting ‘screwed’, I sure hope that the Sabres at least left a little something extra on the nightstand on their way out the door.

(I wrote this post yesterday, but on my way into work this morning, the radio guys were discussing this very topic, with one of them opining that to just decide “to hell with hockey” is to “cut your nose off to spite your face”. Well…no. Not really, no. It’s not like I’d be sitting around for three hours staring at the walls when I might have been watching hockey. I’m finding other stuff to occupy my time with. It can be done. Really. Might be hard for a couple of guys who are paid to talk about sports all day to imagine, but I can fill the sports-sized hole in my life just fine.)

Ultimately, though, I find sports less fun than ever before, with the exception of the Olympic Games. I dislike the idea of using sports to foster civic identity, and in any event, that’s rather overblown anyway — witness the number of Notre Dame fans you meet in regular life who have never been within five hundred miles of South Bend. I don’t identify with these teams, and it seems silly to, as one local radio host proudly proclaims, “Root for the shirt, regardless of who’s wearing it.” More and more I find sports in general to be a dreary affair, regardless of who wins or loses. This year I haven’t watched a single play of any football game since week four — where in years past, even after I gave up on the Bills I would watch a game here or there involving some good team or other. I haven’t watched a baseball game in its entirety in nearly two decades. Hockey? Basketball? No and no. And so it goes.

But you know what I do still like about sports? The writing. I can read good sports writing until the end of days. I guess I can pretty much do without the sports themselves, though.

(Nothing I have written here should be taken as a newfound ambivalence toward Tom Brady. Because, really: screw that guy!)

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Cartoon Violence for Men

I’m thinking a lot about football lately, in light of the recent ‘Bounty’ scandal involving the New Orleans Saints, their coaches, and their players, who engaged in a system of paid incentives to players for injuring opposing players. Saints head coach Sean Payton has been suspended the entire season without pay; former defensive coordinator Gregg Williams has been suspended ‘indefinitely’, which means he gets to sit out a good long time before the NFL — commissioner Roger Goodell, specifically — decides to entertain his prospects for a return to coaching. There are also fines and docking of draft picks, I assume.

This whole business is deeply troubling for me as a football fan. I love the game and have for years; I love the strategies involved, and the beauty of well-executed plays and drives. I love how the game can elevate players to heroic status (although football is not unique in this). But here’s an admission: one of the best things about football is its physical nature. And that, unfortunately, is just a nice way of saying, “Football is a violent game and we like our violence.”

One thing that makes a football season so intense is that there are only 16 games. That’s it: your team plays once a week, and one loss here or there can be calamitous for a team hoping to make the playoffs. In baseball, you have 162 games; the very best teams can still expect to walk off the field as losers at least 50 times in a year. But why does football only have 16 games? Because, obviously, the game is too physical — too violent — to be played more than that.

We love to see players hitting hard, and getting hit hard. We don’t like to see players injured, which is why we applaud when they bounce back up, walk back to the sidelines, sit a minute or two, and then retake the field. It’s why players who excel in a game despite being hurt — say, Emmitt Smith in the 1993 regular season finale, when he had a huge game despite a separated shoulder — can attain legendary status. We love quarterbacks who can stand in there and deliver a perfect pass despite the fact that they’re about to get taken down by a hard-rushing defensive end. We adore it when a receiver comes across the middle of the field, leaps into the air, snags the ball, and holds onto it despite getting sandwiched between two defensive backs. We prize those moments when the running back charges full-speed into a cluster of bodies and, despite taking multiple hits from multiple players, still manages to churn forward enough to get the first down.

And on defense? That’s when we love to see our boys dishing out the punishment. We love to see our defensive ends put the quarterback on his ear — even moreso if the QB never sees him coming. We love to see an opposing receiver grab the ball, only to have one of our defensive backs slam him so hard that the ball pops out. And we think it’s great when a linebacker comes flying in out of nowhere to knock a running back off his feet, backwards. We love the big hits, the ones so hard that the announcers go “Wow!”, the ones so brutal that you can hear the fans in the stadium go “Ooohhhhh!”, the ones where you can hear the actual impact of the hit captured in the parabolic microphones from the sidelines.

We know that these are violent hits, and we know that injuries are a part of the game, because they happen all the time. But some injuries are worse than others, and for most of them, we just hope the backup is ready to play. Even a bad injury — say, a torn ACL — doesn’t seem as bad these days. It’s a season-ender, but they’ll be back next year. That particular injury is getting more and more treatable all the time; Wes Welker had one in a playoff game a few years ago, and time was then that would have seriously jeopardized the entire next season. Instead, he was back in time for the season opener.

Mostly, I think we view football violence as live-action cartoon violence. The crushing hits that football players dish out and endure are the equivalent of the disastrous things that happen to Wile E. Coyote whilst pursuing the Road Runner. For the most part, we expect our players to take monster hits, maybe get hurt a bit, but show up in the next scene. Maybe the next game. If it’s bad, maybe after a few games or even next season. Once in a great while something very bad happens, a Mike Utley or a Kevin Everett, but I think that football fans, in their hearts-of-hearts, view that as the price of doing business, and for the most part, the thousands of guys who play football over the years take their hits and then retire and go on to live normal lives, free of football pain at last.

Except, thing is, now we increasingly know that they don’t. Increasingly we must confront the fact that former football players have significantly shorter average lifespans, and we must confront the fact that football injuries, repeatedly endured over a period of years, take huge tolls in terms of quality of life after the game. We know that the brain is not nearly as able to bounce back from concussion as we used to think. We have to acknowledge that football is a game that takes a huge toll, and we have to acknowledge that all those hits we’re cheering on Sunday afternoons have a price.

And just when we’re acknowledging this, we learn that there are coaches and players out there who not only don’t take this seriously, but see it as another way of gaining possible advantage on the field. That’s what it’s all about, and why it’s so sickening. I’ve heard fans say that other football scandals — SpyGate being the most famous — are worse because that was actual cheating: doing something against the rules in order to gain competitive advantage. Well, by that definition, bounty programs are cheating too, and worse, they are cheating that involves the intentional infliction of physical injury. I don’t think we hear this enough in this whole scandal. The Saints didn’t just run a bounty program. They didn’t just pay players to hurt their opponents. The Saints cheated, and so did anyone else in the NFL who has been doing this.

Football isn’t cartoon violence. Football players aren’t superhuman figures who can get run over by steamrollers and reinflate themselves; they’re not beings who can escape pursuers by stopping to paint a train tunnel opening on a wall and then duck inside. They’re human beings, as fragile as anyone else, and they are playing a game that works against that very fragility — so much so that they have to wear body armor. That we still have problems with people taking this seriously is truly disheartening.

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On Whitney and the Anthem

In comments to the previous post on Whitney Houston, Kerry asks why I didn’t post the video of Houston’s now-iconic performance of The Star-Spangled Banner at Super Bowl XXV. It’s a fair question, worthy of a couple of answers.

First of all…the performance wasn’t truly live. She was singing, with the mike turned off, while her pre-recorded performance, great as it is, was played over the stadium speakers and to the broadcast audience. She wasn’t lip-syncing, but I have a hard time seeing that performance as a truly live performance.

Second: well, this may be stupid. But I often have a hard time separating events from one another, and that anthem performance is irrevocably linked with one of the most painful outcomes I’ve ever experienced for one of my sports teams. (The only one that hurts more to remember, down to this day, is the Atlanta Braves’ Game Seven defeat of my beloved Pittsburgh Pirates in the bottom of the ninth in the 1992 National League Championship Series.) I hear Whitney Houston’s anthem, and so much more floods through my mind: botched tackles. A heroic game by Thurman Thomas, to no avail. And yes…Wide Right.

Because the next three Super Bowl losses were all by much greater margins, they’re easier to remember for me. Super Bowl XXV, though, is the one they should have won. They should have been champions when that night ended, and they weren’t, and what’s worst is that as things unfolded, that was their best shot at it.

This all probably sounds pretty trite, but I have very powerful memories of that game. The Bills’ Super Bowl runs all happened (except for the last one) when I was at college, 800 miles away from home. The Buffalo Bills were home. When I sat down to watch that game, it wasn’t just to watch my favorite team; it was in hopes and expectations that when it ended, I’d be sharing the same emotional high that everyone back home would be feeling. Instead…I got a kick in the gut.

You know what the worst thing was that night? I had a sectional rehearsal for one of my musical ensembles that night, scheduled for 9:30 or so. I’d told my section leader beforehand, “Look, I’ll be there, but not one second before that game ends. Because it’s the Bills.” So the damn game ended, and I had to get up and head out for a damned rehearsal, pretending that I was just fine and ready to get back to work. Which was, frankly, the very last thing I wanted to do.

I’ve been through an awful lot of shit since the night of Super Bowl XXV, so it may seem silly to still feel icky feelings about that night and how it ended. But I’m not really wired to separate entire events from things that happened in life outside of it, which is why as a rule, my memories of Whitney Houston’s Star-Spangled Banner aren’t terribly happy ones.

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Oh yeah? How ’bout a giant SPOON, then?

Yesterday, I posted to Twitter thusly:

Win hockey, you get a giant cup. Win Wimbledon, you get a giant plate. What’s needed is a sport where the winner is awarded a giant fork.

Well…wouldn’t you know it. Behold the prize for winning the Tirreno-Adriatico bicycle race:

I hate it when reality upstages a joke of mine!

(But not all bad for me: Kevin Drum, one of my favorite liberal bloggers, even though I am currently not reading political blogs because I just need a nice long break, re-tweeted me on this. That’s cool, especially since he’s never linked my blog!)

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39-37

As of this writing, the Pittsburgh Pirates are 39-37. They’re close to entering July with a record at or over .500. That would be amazing.

I was thinking about the Pirates’ 1992 season, which started amazingly — they charged out of the gate, playing five or six games and then going on a nine-game winning streak — and ended with the most heartbreaking end to a sporting event in which I had a rooting interest that I’ve ever seen. Seriously: the Francisco Cabrera hit in the bottom of the ninth in Game Seven of the NLCS that year was more gutwrenching than even Scott Norwood’s miss in Super Bowl XXV. While the Bills were on the edge the entire game of that Super Bowl, the Pirates really looked like they were going to break through to the World Series after two consecutive years in which they lost the NLCS. They took a 2-0 lead to the bottom of the ninth, only to see a nightmare of an inning unfold in which the Braves put up three to win the pennant.

I watched my fair share of Pirates games that season, whenever I could. ESPN had the Pirates a lot, and I’d watch them play the Cubs on WGN and the Braves on TBS. One of those Braves games stands out as one of the most hard-luck games I’ve ever seen a team lose. I remember the Pirates pitcher, Danny Jackson, for whom they had traded despite his awful record at that point in the season because they desperately needed left-handed pitching, throwing a masterful game but losing, 1-0. It was worse, even, than that, however. I was able to do some research and track down the actual box score from that game, and Ye Gods! Jackson pitched seven innings, and a reliever tossed the eighth. Between the two of them, they combined to throw a one-hitter. But that one hit was a solo home run by David Justice, and that one run would be all the Braves would need.

The Pirates actually had a great chance to score. I don’t recall if anyone was on base at the time, but center fielder Andy Van Slyke hit a ball deep to center field. Deep to center field. In fact, he hit it out of the park for a home run — or, rather, it would have been a home run had Braves CF Otis Nixon not run to the wall, jumped up, stuck his glove about a foot over the fence, and hauled in the ball. It was an astonishing catch, truly (you can watch it here), and one of the biggest “Oh, come on!” moments I’ve ever experienced as a sports fan.

Oh well. But apparently the Pirates are getting good again! Huzzah!

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Hee hee hee….

I’m not going to lie: I love that the Miami Heat lost the NBA Finals. I love that, after crowning himself “King James”, LeBron the Great was pretty much of a non-factor. I love that the supreme arrogance displayed when these guys put themselves together and declared that they were going to win seven championships came to naught.

Mostly, though, I loathe LeBron for the way he handled himself in leaving Cleveland last year. I don’t hate that he left Cleveland, in principle; star players leave their original markets all the time, for various reasons. Some leave because of money. Others leave because they just don’t feel that the management of their original team has a plan to improve and win. Still others leave for personal reasons, like when Chris Drury left the Buffalo Sabres four years ago. It happens. It sucks when you’re a fan and your team’s very best player leaves, but sports fans for the most part accept that it happens.

LeBron James could have left Cleveland in a classy way a year ago, but he chose not to. He chose to toy with Cleveland, and act like there was a chance he might stick around, and he refused to reveal his decision until several weeks into the free agency period, after most of the top free agents had already been signed around the league. Then he announced his departure. It was very hard to escape the impression that James did all these things because he wanted to rub Cleveland’s nose in it.

I also could have done without the comparisons of James to Michael Jordan. Now, to be fair, James himself wasn’t the one making these comparisons. But still — any such talk is silly. Maybe James is a better technical player than Jordan; I have no idea, but maybe, just maybe, he is. But the difference in the “intangibles” is so marked that it can’t be denied. Jordan is one of the greatest “clutch” athletes in the history of not just basketball, but sport itself. Jordan didn’t wilt in the spotlight; he didn’t disappear in the tough moments when the next basket or two might decide who takes home the trophy. And Jordan never left the final game of the NBA Finals without taking the trophy with him. LeBron James has done that. Twice.

This morning, James said something to the effect that all of his “haters” didn’t matter to him because they’d all be getting up in the morning with the same personal problems, and he’d just live with his family and make money and yada yada yada. Well, that’s true. But I got up this morning without most of the country engaging in schadenfreude at my expense. I got that going for me.

Which is nice.

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Look, Mommy! Mommy, look! I’m doin’ it by myself! Look, Mommy!!

The greatest force for evil in the sporting world, New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady, has apparently just discovered water slides.

God help me…there’s just something a little bit endearing about this. There really, truly is. Of course, whatever it is that’s a little bit endearing about this is totally outweighed by the colossal wrongness of this, but it’s there.

(St. Tom the Overrated is having quite the time on this “organized-team-activity”-free lockout. First bad dancing, and now this!)

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Racehorse Names I’d Like To See

Today was the something-somethingth running of the Kentucky Derby, a sporting event that seems so civilized even though it involves guys getting on the backs of four-legged animals and then whipping their arses until they run really fast in a big circle. But anyway, I’ve always thought the names given to racehorses are kind of odd. I mean, who names their pet cat or dog “Animal Kingdom”, “Super Saver”, “War Emblem”, or any other multiple-word name? I’ve never understood this, but I was inspired to go on Twitter and rattle off a bunch of racehorse names I’d like to see.

Wants To Kill You
Slept With Your Mom
Owns A Burmese Sweatshop
You Killed My Father Prepare To Die
Han Shot First
Pooped In Your Backyard
iPhone Users Are Losers
Kirk Kicks Picard’s Ass
Spittle-Beflecked Rapscallion
Dreams Of Trampling Puppies
Begin The Zombie Uprising
Who Controls The British Crown
That Old Sumbitch
Beans Beans The Musical Fruit
Nathan Fillion Kicks Ass
My Jockey is A Drunken Thief
Amanda Hugginkiss
This Underwear Chafes My Backside
Bob Barker Says Spay Your Pets
Everything Is Better With A Bag Of Weed

And last but not least:

Only Dorks Wear Overalls

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A-mazin’!

My Mets Journal is all kinds of awesome, even for a non-Mets fan (and a person whose interest in baseball is hanging by a thread). This fellow is doing a drawing to depict something about every game the Mets play this year, and he’s got some artistic chops. I love this!

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My greatest Sabres playoff memory

The other day, as I was driving home from work, the guys on the radio (Schopp and the Bulldog, WGR-550 AM!) were asking callers for their “greatest Sabres playoff memories”. The NHL season is ending and the playoffs are getting ready to start, and the locally beloved Sabres have managed to play their way back into the playoffs after a sluggish start to the season; thus, hockey fever is starting to sweep around the region again after falling off a bit in the last year or two. (Plus the team has new ownership that is so adept at saying the right things, that it’s almost like Buffalo’s hockey fandom has found itself inside a corny sports movie. But anyway….) So, here’s my personal greatest playoff memory.

The NHL endured a lockout earlier in the 2000s that wiped out an entire season, but when the league returned to play a year later, suddenly the Sabres were…really, really good. They went to the Eastern Conference finals both years, and most folks around here tend to think that, with a few luckier breaks (especially in 2006, when injuries ravaged the team the longer the playoffs went on), one or both of those teams would have brought home a Stanley Cup. (And believe me, folks: if/when the Sabres actually do win the Stanley Cup, this entire region is going to throw a party that will make Mardi Gras look like Thanksgiving with the Donner Party.)

Here’s the thing about me, though: I’m not much of a hockey fan. I enjoy it when I see it on teevee, but that’s not very often because we don’t have cable and I don’t go out much. (I should go out more, but I don’t. Because I’m dull, you see.) And because I don’t get to watch much hockey at all, I end up not knowing all that much about it. Remember back in the 1990s when whatever teevee network had the NHL rights decided to make the game “easier to follow” by superimposing a blue dot on the ice wherever the puck was? And whenever someone would actually shoot the puck, there’d be a red laser-streak thing on the teevee to show where it went? Most hockey fans I knew back then scoffed at this and made fun of it…but I was the guy that was meant for. No more could I complain that I had no idea where the puck was! I could follow the most important aspect of the game, and thus could turn my attention to other matters, like learning the rules. I remember seeing games, getting caught up in the action of the guys skating every which way, the sheer speed of it all, and then everyone suddenly stopping skating. “Why are they stopping?” I’d ask. “Icing,” came the reply. I’d just nod, because no matter what sporting event is on teevee in a bar, you do not want to be the guy asking for explanations of the rules. Even if it’s the Winter Olympics and you’re watching curling, a sport which by all accounts has no rules at all and only crowns a winner by an off-screen game of Rock-Paper-Scissors after the curling is done.

So anyway, the Sabres in 2005-2006 were really good and only got eliminated from the playoffs pretty much because by the end of their run, injuries had reduced their team to seven guys and two Zamboni drivers. The next year, though, they were better: they won more games than any other team in the league, and were strong favorites to win it all. They dispatched the New York Islanders with ease in Round One of the playoffs, but their Round Two opponent, the New York Rangers, proved a bit more difficult.

Gave Five of the second round in 2007 came on May 4. This happened to also be the opening release date of Spiderman 3. A friend of mine at work was going to the movie, so we agreed to meet at the theater. Problem was, he was going to the game. Now, we were going to a late enough showing that this shouldn’t have been a problem — it was a 10:15 pm showing or something like that, and the game should have been over somewhere shortly after 9:00. So I hung out at home with my family, noodling about on the computer, doing this and that. I couldn’t watch the Sabres game, so I brought up the game-tracking page on FOXSports.com and kept refreshing. And I was torn.

See, the Rangers led the game 1-0 most of the way. So on the one hand, I’m rooting for the Sabres to come back and tie it. But on the other hand, I know that if this game goes to overtime, my friend is unlikely to be able to make the movie. Thus I was rooting strongly for the Sabres to put two quick goals on the board, take the game in regulation, and then everybody goes on. Except that didn’t happen, and with 8 seconds to go, the Rangers still had their 1-0 lead. So I was resigned to the Sabres losing, but my friend making the movie.

Which is why I both cheered and became dismayed when Sabre Chris Drury put in a shot with 7.7 seconds to go to tie the game. Into overtime it went. Now the start time of the movie was less than 45 minutes away, and I knew that getting out of a sell-out arena and getting to the movie theater (about ten miles away, maybe) in that time was unlikely. My friend called me at home from the arena (I could barely hear him over the crowd noise in there) to tell me that if the game ended quickly, they’d still try. I told him I’d wait outside until the last possible minute.

Overtime didn’t go on too long, but long enough to make me think that there was no way he was getting there on time. The Sabres won the game, though, and the nature of that win — snatching victory away in the face of certain defeat that would have had them trailing in the series had they lost — only fueled the Sabre-fever that was sweeping over the town. I saw online that the Sabres had won, and then I left for Regal Cinemas to hopefully await my friend.

Who got there ten minutes after I did. Before the movie started.

He was actually riding with another friend of his; how that guy got his car out of parking near the arena, out of postgame traffic, and onto the highway south out of Buffalo in that little time, I consider among the things I’m probably better off not knowing. But they got there. I’d already bought tickets, so we went inside. The ticket-taker guy saw that my friend and his friend were in Sabres gear, and said something like, “I can’t believe I had to work through that game.”

“Oh dude, it was awesome,” my friend said. “I was there.”

“You were there?” the ticket-taker said. “Didn’t it end, like, fifteen minutes ago?”

“Yeah. I’m still tingling.”

And away we went into the theater, with the ticket-taker guy probably wondering if they’d driven from the arena to the theater in the Batmobile. (Which would have been ironic, as we were seeing Spiderman 3. You know, using a car from DC comics to see a Marvel movie.)

Funny thing was, the movie didn’t start on time. They never do, and there was the fifteen minutes or so of trailers, Coca-cola commercials, and all the rest of it. The auditorium was pretty full, and as it filled up, there was one final great thing about that game that happened: every single time someone else came into the auditorium who was wearing a Sabres shirt or jacket, everyone in there would cheer. One guy came in wearing a Chris Drury jersey, and he almost got a standing ovation. Everybody was a fan. Everybody was talking about that game. That game wasn’t a Cup-winning game; it wasn’t even a Conference Finals-winning game. It wasn’t even a series winning game: the Sabres only had a 3-2 edge in the series after that one, and ended up dispatching the Rangers from the playoffs two days later in Game Six. At that point, no one thought for a second that the Sabres were doing anything other than winning the Cup, and that that game would give them the unstoppable momentum that would carry them to winning it all.

It didn’t work out that way, unfortunately; in the next series, the Eastern Conference Finals, the Ottawa Senators would leap out to a 3-0 series lead and then eliminate the Sabres in five games. And during the ensuing offseason, a bunch of miscalculations and errors by the Sabres management led to the team’s best players, including Chris Drury, leaving for other teams. But on that night, that was it. The Sabres were on the way. Before the movie started, I said to my friend, “Do you realize that you were present for what may end up being one of the very greatest moments in Buffalo sports history?” And even though that win didn’t lead to ultimately winning the Cup, it was still one the greatest moments in Buffalo sports history.

And that’s my greatest Sabres playoff moment. From a game I didn’t see.

Go Sabres!

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