Can't you just see him chirping the other preschoolers?

As I've now officially entered hockey withdrawal, and am trying to make up for it with shit tons of baseball (which is just not the same...sigh) I felt like I needed a post to cheer myself up.

"So, Skippy," I said, "what could you possibly post on to make yourself feel better about the lack of hockey in your life?"

See Bruins drink. Drink, Bruins! Drink!

So the Bruins (and all of Boston by extension) are celebrating pretty fucking hard right now. 

Everywhere I go I keep coming across more tales of celebration.  But there is one that has particularly tickled my fancy-- the Bruins' now infamous Foxwood's party.

No, I'm not still drunk. Really.

When I woke up on Thursday morning, my knees hurt, my palm was throbbing, I had bruises on the tops of my feet and I reeked of beer.

Life was perfect.

Procrastination will be the death of me

So it's 5:30 PM on the Monday of Game 6, the Bruins might be eliminated tonight, and I have A SHIT TON that I need to post before 8PM in case the 'Nucks take it on the road in Boston, like the Mavs did last night (GTFO, LeBron!!!!). So here goes the other half of my Hottest Players in the Finals post, complete with picspam.

Participant Observation

So, you know that feeling you get when you're watching the big game and you're in a bar full of people and you're all wearing shirts for your team and getting wasted and making cracks about players and commentators and generally soaking in the whole city's energy, and everywhere you look there are more fans and you think, "Ah! My people!"?

I don't.

Eeeeeeeeeee! New layout!

Look at it! Look at it!  Isn't it puuuuuuuuurdy?

Massive thanks to Shaina at notenoughbbq.com, who did these cute cartoon versions of us. 

They are scary accurate, considering that the dress Skippy is wearing in the bottom banner is eerily like one she actually owns that Shaina has never seen or even heard about.  It was just apparently magically channelled through her pen.

Shaina and I are bros from way back, having been on the exec board of Wellesley's Sci-fi club together for years.  Go check out her comic Steampunk Soiree if you like Victorian robots, pretty art or awesome things in general!

To make this marginally hockey related (not that it needs to be, considering), I give you a few more koans from the Zen of Puckbunnies:

So we've learned Alex Burrows is a cannibal...

I was innocently sitting on the couch, innocently enjoying innocent Game 1 of the Stanley Cup Finals, when all of a sudden...

Dude, did Alex Burrows just bite Patrice Bergeron?

IT HAS BEEN CONFIRMED

SKIPPY AND SCHADENFREUDE ARE HOCKEY PROPHETS.

We so called that the Bruins would face the Canucks in the finals.

I'm sure Skippy will post something with actual content about last night's mad intense game, the bad-assery of her future husband Tim Thomas and the fact that we now get to perv over Ryan Kesler and root for the B's at the same time which is the best kind of multitasking, but I just want to put it out there that we are fucking PROPHETS.

The Zen of Puckbunnies (Vol 2-- Bugaloo Electric Over Cedars)

Skippy's Get-Psyched-About-The-Bruins Post

I know Schadenfreude has already done one of these, but I felt it was important to do one separately, mostly because I need to independently work myself up for my (temporary) new team. Also, it gave me an opportunity to use THIS PICTURE:

A good rule of thumb: When your opponent is hemorrhaging from the face, keep punching. It means you're doing it right!

But before we move on...

Dear 2010-11 Flyers,

Put down the golf clubs for a second and pay attention.

We started off this season with high hopes. I mean, wet-behind-the-ears rookie goaltender beating the Penguins at the opening of the Consol? Could it get better than that? No, apparently, because when Game 4 against the Bruins came around Bob looked like the most experienced player on our team. When the best forward in any given game is James van Riemsdyk, you know you’ve got problems.

It wasn’t all bad. Claude Giroux came out of his shell and proved to the league that he was the Second Coming of AWESOME, a fact I had known for some time. JVR notched a Gordie Howe against the Tampa Bay Lightning, demonstrating that we live in some form of alternate dimension. Jody Shelley was useless except occasionally when he pounded someone’s face in, which was highly entertaining.

We should have, however, seen the collapse coming. Losing Chris Pronger was a sign from above that things were probably not going to work out, as the Flyers require a certain blindside-elbow-per-capita ratio to be maintained in order for them to do well (it’s an indicator, like plus-minus or the Corsi score). Our goaltending decided to dissolve right at the worst possible time, our forwards suddenly couldn’t score even if someone had obeyed my commands and hogtied Tim Thomas in the trapezoid, and our defense seemingly decided that it would be rude to not allow the other team the opportunity to shoot, crash the net, and then poke the rebound home.

But hey. Maybe you all just got tired. Maybe you got bored with this whole “winning” thing and felt like seeing what failure was like. Maybe you decided that it would be unfair to keep taking so much airtime away from the Phillies. We’ll never really know. Holmgren and Co. will do a hack job (probably) on this team during the offseason, and then in October we’ll all re-gather, ready for another go-round.

And this time, maybe you’ll make it to the finals before folding like a card table.

Love,

Skippy

p.s. Now I have to root for the Bruins, you motherfuckers.

Changing of the guard

Well, I dug out my Bruins shirt from the bottom of my laundry basket (yeah, I'm gross like that) and started browsing pics of Ference and Bergie on the Googlies-- I have a new team to get excited about.

Why do you do this to me?

Well, they didn’t get their asses kicked. Instead they chose to take Skippy’s heart and use it to practice their slapshots or some such madness. Maybe Carcillo nommed on it with his gums or something. (Question for the ages: why does Carcillo wear a mouthgard? He has no teeth to protect!).

Karma

Rarely do I turn off hockey games. I have sat through more pain and suffering just for the sake of watching hockey than I'd like to admit. But when Boston scored tonight to make it 7-3, I made Schadenfreude hand me the remote so I could turn off the TV and end this.

What had I done wrong? How had I failed them? I had all of my lucky talismans--I had been sleeping in my Giroux t-shirt, avoiding the Dropkick Murphys, and was currently curled up under my Phillies blanket. I had been careful not to disturb the karma. Unfortunately, I was starting to come to the conclusion that maybe they were the ones who had failed me. Like, with some really shitty defense, lack of offensive support, a limp-dick power play and goaltending...well, shockingly, goaltending that was bad but not exactly our main problem tonight, right boys?

The one consolation that I keep giving myself is that it's Game 1 There are at least three games left for them to continue breaking our hearts, because they're a Philadelphia team and that's what they do. Monday night, everything will start over again, and I'll sit in some bar in Boston staring up at the TV and praying hope against hope that my team won't embarrass me this time.

Which is starting to look decidedly unlikely.