Not really a game report...

I don’t watch the Ducks very often. The Wings only play them a few times a year, usually around two o’clock in the morning, and spend most of the game bouncing pucks off Holmstrom that never end up counting as goals. The Ducks goal horn sounds like what would happen if Satan (the Prince of Darkness, not the hockey player) tended a Lighthouse of the Damned. Chris Pronger’s legs being so much longer than his torso looks foolish and it pisses me off. There’s a 35% or more chance that someone leaves the game on IR.

So when I’m watching the Ducks, I’m not actually watching the individual players; I’m watching myself, in the reflection of the glare off the glass of the television screen, slowly going insane.

I cite this as the reason why I’m almost happier for this game to be over than I am for the Red Wings to have won the game.

In the first ten minutes, I was calm enough, and the Red Wings were doing well enough, that I was almost ready to admit that for the first time, I had been watching the players on Anaheim, and I saw more than a few playing some damn good hockey.

The feeling didn’t last very long.

No, sadly, from that point out, the game was yet another unbalanced three-speed ceiling fan of emotion, from Getzlaf’s goal all the way until Chris Pronger tried to Jamie Langenbrunner another 2,638,468,234 foot shot past Ozzie in the dying seconds of the game.

It’s also really nice to know that you can still trip, hold, and otherwise interfere with Pavel Datsyuk all you want, no whistle. The officiating is consistent this way, I’ll give it that.

But now I’ll try to move away from the cynical, end-of-the-world, I hate hockey mentality, because the Red Wings won tonight, and no matter how the actual game made me feel, beating the Ducks is still beating the Ducks. So here’s what I walked away from this game with:

• Chris Osgood is absofreakinglutely amazing. It isn't just everyday that the general populace will go along with me when I say this, so I'm getting it in while I can.
• Derek Meech - aside from that part where he looked like he died, I think I like where this is going.
• I shouldn't try to watch hockey after drinking a double-strong caramel macchiato, because my roommate will come in to see why I'm yelling 'NEIDERMAYER' at my tv, then worry about the fact that I'm twitching worse than Nikolai Khabibulin during a shoot-out.
  

Finally, I’m serious about Pronger’s torso-to-legs ratio pissing me off. I’m not sure what it is about them. Maybe it’s jealousy. As a veteran of 15 years of ballet lessons, I know what I’m talking about when I say that someone has long, well-turned out dancer’s legs, and Chris Pronger is one of those people. God. His grand jetes would be spectacular. But… this is Chris Pronger we’re talking about, so he doesn’t leap through the air like a gazelle, he just lifts his elbows and looks foolish. I’ve drawn you a diagram to illustrate, practically to scale, just in case you hadn't noticed it before:

I do these things when I’m up too late at night. So if his eyes are stealing your soul. as they are mine, blame Pacific standard time, not me.