The stock response in comment sections when I claim that Virginia Tech will travel well to the Sugar Bowl (given our prior record of doing so to three previous Sugar Bowls) is an overhead shot from the 2007 ACC Championship Game in Jacksonville, angled toward BC's side and showing a very thinly-populated stadium.

So let's do a thought experiment for the Big XII and Big Ten fans. Imagine the Fargodome (a non-descript destination on the geographic edge of your conference with few locals interested in your teams) has 70,000 seats. Put both your conference championship game and the bowl game its loser will go to there. Then have your team sent there, on a week's notice, for the third time in three years with the possibility of a fourth trip a month away.

Now play an opponent like Baylor or Northwestern, only with a third of even those schools' traveling fanbases. Your last Fargo trip was the occasion for one of the most embarrassing on-field episodes in school history, and when Northwestern/Baylor visited you for a conference game a month ago, their NFL-ready quarterback stabbed you in the gut with a comeback ESPN has replayed literally hundreds of times since.

If you can confidently say your school would fill 45,000 seats in Fargo, North Dakota under those circumstances, then criticize us. Otherwise, shove it.

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@HokiesJournal Hokies Journal

Reading quotes from 2003 stories on VT's move from Big East to ACC, I've learned whatever VT says re: SEC should be taken w/ grain of salt.

It's interesting to read quotes like Mark Giannotto's above and recognize how many smart people who didn't follow Hokie athletics at the time either don't or can't understand the context of that move for Virginia Tech.

2010-11 conference realignment is a money grab (with a side of rivalry paranoia from Texas A&M), any theoretical Virginia Tech participation in this cycle explicitly included. 2003, though, was an existential battle for VT in particular and most of the Big East in general. (The only school I can find that seems to feel now even close to how we felt then is Iowa State.)

At the time, Jim Weaver and Charles Steger were working with a history of being jilted by the dominant, culture-setting athletic power of its region, a less-than-decade-old boot from the Metro Conference of which it had once been a core member, and a Big East all-sports admission under financial terms dictated at gunpoint (five years of zero basketball revenue sharing, five years reduced; VT's first year of full financial membership in the Big East would have been 2010-11). WVU fans rightly crow that they've done just fine since 2004, but in 2003 the future of the Big East's leftovers looked MWC-esque.

Media members should be skeptical in general about accepting public figures' statements. But 2003 Jim Weaver spoke on behalf of a university desperate to preserve meager gains it had taken fifty years to achieve. 2011 Weaver speaks for a successful, profitable member of a conference full of academic peers near whose geographic center it sits. Context matters.

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[Canucks fans] are the same people who harbour conspiracy theories, who reportedly threw projectiles at Gary Battman on the ice during the Stanley Cup presentation and one who shouted out while rioting that "this is all Bettman's fault!"

Safely shielded behind the Rockies in Edmonton, Terry Jones goes on the best major-media rant against a losing team I've read since Gregg Doyel's 2007 anti-Illinois basketball blast, then castigates the lunacy in the team's immediate orbit before ripping Vancouver's population as a whole for perpetuating a sporting riot trend. The whole column is a good laugh, but calling out the over-the-top reaction to Bettman as a particularly local character flaw drew my notice.

Gord Stellick identified Vancouver's reaction more correctly on XM Home Ice Thursday afternoon as a progression of a perverse new hockey tradition. His wrong turn, though, came in wondering why fans in Anaheim, Carolina and Tampa [sic] had booed Bettman too — paraphrasing, "after all, he's why those teams are there! This whole southern team idea, that's a Bettman thing!"1

It's easy to get things wrong mid-rant on live radio. But fact-checking is what we have the Internet for, and his recollection of pre-lockout winner Tampa in particular turning on Bettman didn't ring true to me. So, to YouTube.

As it turns out, Anaheim briefly booed Bettman's entry in 2007 with lockout wounds still fresh, but got over it quickly as he cracked a joke and announced Scott Niedermayer's Conn Smythe in the same breath.  In 2006 in Raleigh, a recorded fanfare drowned out everything until Bettman began complimenting the celebrating fans; Tampa Bay in 2004 cheered his entry. Sustained arena-wide Bettman-hate didn't get truly started until a string of road team wins: Pittsburgh's loving reaction to the Red Wings' 2008 win when Bettman inexplicably went long-form with his congratulations as the boos swelled, Detroit returning the favor to the Pens in 2009, and Philadelphia fans surprising absolutely no one in 2010 after Chicago won. In all those, post-lockout bitterness made Bettman a good outlet for team-centric frustration, no more.

What neither Stellick nor Jones could get to is that a major difference between Finals fans in Pittsburgh, Detroit and Philly on one hand and Vancouver on the other is the sports media environment they live in. On this side of the border, Gary Bettman is a sideshow we try to ignore. Up North, though, nearly two decades of Canadian media treating Bettman as Canada's Emmanuel Goldstein shapes their behavior. That makes it hard to tell how much of Wednesday night's explosive hatred was Vancouver and how much was a psychosis all of Canada needs to own.

1. Speaking of getting things wrong: The Ducks and Lightning predate Bettman, and Carolina is there because Pete Karmanos (a) bid too low in 1990 for the Tampa Bay expansion franchise that became the Lightning, (b) found the Research Triangle to be on a better economic trajectory than Columbus, Ohio, the other place with a promising arena project in 1997, and (c) once he moved the club, had his sizable ego invested in making hockey work where he had damn well put it.

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If you haven't been following the series, it took exactly one game for Bruins fans to work up a Canadiens-level hatred for the Canucks. This was surprising because Vancouver isn't Tampa Bay, Columbus, or any of those other microwavable insta-Bettman hockey cities that any Original Six fan base instinctively hates.

Reading Simmons on hockey fandom is a terrible idea, because hockey most of all brings out the caricature in him.

He knows the NBA, NFL and Major League Baseball (well, at least the AL East), his attempts at soccer commentary are so transparently dumb they're easy to dismiss, and he mostly stays away from college sports. When hockey comes up, though, he's not quite bad enough to ignore, but neither does he know nor respect the game enough to offer good ideas.

That leaves material that, were it within the hockey bubble, would be easy to file away as an irrelevant hybrid of Don Cherry-ism and less-knowledgeable NYT-style Original Six trolling. Since non-hockey people pay attention to Simmons, though, memes like his February 2009 gossip that 15 NHL teams would go under by mid-2011 can damage the game to the casual (i.e. front-running) sports fan.

That leads us to today, as he revels in jumping back on the Bruins bandwagon and does a couple different drive-bys on Sun Belt hockey fans in the process. The second is unintentionally revealing:

My dream scenario: two of the WTFDTCHAHT's move to Quebec and Toronto8, giving us 10 Canadian teams (I'm including Buffalo...

(8) WTFDTCHAHT stands for "Why the f--- does that city have a hockey team?" I'm looking at you, Nashville. And you too, Phoenix.

If Simmons had paid attention to hockey at all since the Predators joined the league in 1998, he'd know a couple things.

First, the Preds play more-or-less the style of hockey he turned away from. They don't exactly trap, but their team identity has always been stifling defense, and they've never been able to secure the kind of sniper that makes SportsCentre and turns a middling team into a major Cup threat. They won their first playoff series in twelve seasons this year.

That hasn't mattered, though, because Nashville's fans are loyal. Despite one duplicitous owner, another a straight-up fraud, a would-be purchaser undermining the franchise with the municipal leaseholder and local media in an attempt to move it to Ontario, and no great success on the ice, they've shown up — which is a good thing, because unlike Simmons, they don't get to quit and come back when things get better. If they bail, their team dies just like Atlanta's, and no nation of bleeding hearts will cheerlead for their second chance like Canada's decade-plus rally around Winnipeg. Instead, Simmonses will mock them as undeserving of hockey, then go back to watching the NFL and acting superior when their city's team makes an occasional run.

There's nothing inherently wrong with bandwagoning. It's an aspect of casual fandom, often the difference between a team or a sport surviving versus thriving. Hockey's biggest problem is its dearth of precisely this kind of fan. But it's off-putting for a bandwagoner with roots in an easy place to love the game to denigrate those of us walking the hard road.

Simmons gets to take hockey for granted. He can skip out for 15 years, then fly back East and pound the glass with his dad like nothing happened. But we in the South don't, and Simmons's Boston-bred ignorant superiority complex shines brightest when he recommends leaving us behind in favor of the castles he's built in the air while watching baseball.

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THE CONS

Future: Putting a team in Winnipeg won’t inspire any more of the city’s top athletes to take up the sport. Removing it from Atlanta will kill youth hockey in the area. Hockey is doing a much better job of getting kids to play the game in the U.S. — just note the number of players drafted who grew up in southern California and Arizona. This would be a setback in the growth of the game.

Kevin McGran points out today in the Toronto Star why the argument that Canadians' love for hockey entitles them to take clubs from non-traditional markets is so wrongheaded, and in the processes stumbles over why the rejoicing over the league's abandonment of a Southern market is so deeply offensive.

Nobody north or south is upset over Winnipeg getting a team in and of itself -- the few arguments against have been practical. As Travis Hair pointed out in March with his Coyotes in the crosshairs, nobody rejoiced over the heartache of Jets fans in 1996. Sun Belt fans in 2011 don't get that forbearance, though -- the all-too-common refrain from north of 49 is all about how they, the very people who did support some truly pathetic offerings of NHL hockey, somehow don't deserve the opportunity to support this game.

So don't tell me that you love the sport of hockey if you celebrate its failure -- because though the popular Canadian refrain calls it Gary Bettman's comeuppance, outside that bubble this is a retreat for the sport. Hate Bettman and Barry Shenkarow all you want, but the 1996-2011 cohort of Manitoba kids didn't lack hockey inspiration in the Jets' absence, not in a country where the game is so culturally dominant. Georgia kids from 2011 forward won't have those hopes. Nor will the game as a whole have the opportunity that a winning NHL team led by Dustin Byfuglien and Evander Kane in the heart of black America would offer.  Maybe this is a victory for hockey-as-Canadian-symbol, but hockey-as-sport gets hurt here.

Winnipeg will certainly be profitable in the short term, and I hope for Jets (Moose?) fans' sake that they're able to keep their team this time around. But abandoning the ninth-largest city in the U.S. is a long-term loss, not just for the abandoned fans but for everyone who wants this game to succeed and grow. Bettman-schadenfreude doesn't justify celebrating that.

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The Twitter uproar is mostly over his sudden conversion to the anti-goon position, but I was more shocked to find myself agreeing with Mike Milbury's interjection on the first topic of discussion on CBC Satellite Hotstove tonight during the second period of Leafs-Blackhawks.

Expecting balanced debate of the Phoenix Coyotes' situation on a Canadian network is folly.  But tonight's discussion was especially fact-free until Milbury inconveniently mentioned that the only way Winnipeg would work in today's NHL was with a "sugar daddy" owner willing to accept massive losses.  

Eric Francis and Pierre LeBrun (the ringleader of tonight's death-to-Phoenix movement) immediately turned on him. LeBrun asserted that the Canadian dollar wouldn't sink from its current sky-high position versus the greenback (the loonie going south contributed to the 1990s instability of not just Winnipeg and Quebec, but Calgary, Edmonton and Ottawa as well), but Francis's position was perhaps the most enlightening for its hypocrisy.

Francis proclaimed confidence that the NHL's next TV deal would offer plenty of profit to go around. The NHL's Canadian TV contracts with CBC and TSN both run through 2013-14, and the American contract is up this summer and expected to spike massively.  So it's difficult to assume he wasn't talking about the newly-relocated Jets franchise helping itself to American TV dollars -- when one of the primary Canadian complaints against Sun Belt franchises is that through revenue-sharing, they collect a larger share of both Canadian and American TV contract dollars than they add to the league in value.

You can't have it both ways, Canada. If you condemn league subsidy of struggling markets, you can't turn around and endorse re-adding and undoubtedly subsidizing a market about half the size of the next-smallest market in the league, that last failed when the average NHL salary was 43 percent of its current value.  That makes Eric Francis, inasmuch as he agrees with a wide swath of Canadian hockey fans, a massive hypocrite, and Mike Milbury the one-eyed king of the land of the blind.

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Fourteen years ago, I was a lonely Virginia Tech student up in the rafters of the Greensboro Coliseum at his first live NHL game. Driving down, I wasn't sure I really cared which team won. Hearing "Let's go, Buff-a-lo!" from two rows behind, though, I decided that the guys wearing white deserved some cheers in their building.

The team's new home wasn't all that different culturally from my home of Central Virginia. But, put in a bad situation by a non-native team owner, the people of North Carolina took grief across the continent for being too -- what? Provincial? Preoccupied? Just plain dumb? -- to appreciate hockey.

That wasn't so. A few of us knew it at the time. Now, I couldn't be prouder of what North Carolinians (and, yes, we Caniacs across the state line) have shown the once-doubting hockey world. What TSN's Pierre Maguire (who doesn't act nearly the fool on Canadian broadcasts that he does on NBC) called "the best All-Star weekend [he's] ever attended" simply put the exclamation mark on it.

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"Gary Bettman was hired to implement the Bruce McNall vision for the NHL -- expand into non-traditional markets[, etc]. Of course, Bruce McNall went to jail."

Stephen Brunt, author of Gretzky's Tears

Well, I guess we know how Brunt feels about Sun Belt markets. And I guess we also know whose book is coming off my Amazon wishlist.

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It’s taken me over a month to post this. That’s pathetic.

OUTBOUND

• Delta 8, us -4. That’s hours, as in the hours taken from our vacation when the 6 AM CHO-DTW was cancelled on our taxi ride to the airport (as opposed to the night before when we could have known to sleep in!), converting CHO-DTW-MKE into a second, 2-hour DL-paid taxi ride and a 6-hour wait for DCA-MSP-MKE.
• Fixed cars in Charlottesville at 9 AM 1, J in Arlington –$n, J sense of humor -eleventy brazillion
• Hertz/UA 2000, us 0 — as in mileage accrual that got lost when converting a weekly rental from a downtown location into a 6-day rental at MKE because we came in after hours.
• Radio gamble 5, luggage weight 0. I left my XM gear at home this time, hoping to get by with local radio or just scenery, but somehow the mess above ended with a well-equipped Mercury Milan with Sirius in our Gold stall.

WISCONSIN

• Us 3, town that invented the ice cream sundae 0. This should be self-explanatory.
• U.S. 1, Ghana 2 (aet); least-sketchy sports bar in the county 8, J 0.
• H garden visits 1.5, J MLB parks 1.
• Defective giveaway bobbleheads 2, J 0.

CHICAGO

• Chicago Botanical Garden 1, Museum of Science and Industry 1, Shedd Aquarium 0. I think Monterey Bay on our honeymoon may have spoiled us for life.
• J MLB parks claimed 1, drunk-and-disorderly intimidated 1. When he turned around to run from the college-age female event staffers trying to escort him out and saw a guy with eight inches and at least 50 pounds on him staring down at him unamusedly, his attitude adjusted long enough for real security to arrive.
• Wrigley 1, Fenway 0 (comfort); Fenway 1, Wrigley 0 (fan baseball knowledge); Fenway 1, Wrigley 0 (fan behavior). I’ve never seen so many belligerent drunks hauled out of a stadium in my life, and I wasn’t even in the bleachers.
• MLB stadiums life scoreboard 17; NL franchise home games 10 (Montreal/Washington franchise stadiums 3), AL franchise home games 3.
• Google Transit for Android 2, J 1. +3 for getting me out of poor subway/El access situations with judicious bus routings (particularly the atrociously under-capacity Addison station postgame), minus-1 for a bad neighborhood in which it suggested I wait 15 minutes for a Metra train at 10:45 PM. I’ll just keep going to the end of the bus line, pay $30 for the taxi and avoid a beating, thank you.
• Transit pass collection unique additions 5, duplicates 4.

RETURN

• Cops on I-94 overpasses/sidings 20+, current U.S. Presidents in southeastern Wisconsin 1.
• J routings around Milwaukee 1, Google Navigation and VZW 0. “Cannot connect to server?” That’s unhelpful.
• DTW taxiways halfway to Windsor, Ontario 1, stops at Tim Hortons 0, disappointed Js 1.
• Minimum taxi fare ex-CHO $17, late-night hike instead from CHO to auto shop 10 minutes, Virginia humidity 90%, J 0.

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Dateline this, say, January 1996. Any time after August 14, 1995 actually works, though.

• Number of NHL-capable arenas in Winnipeg: 0
• Number of NHL-capable arenas in Phoenix: 1 (AWA, while nowhere near ideal, was an order of magnitude less bad than Winnipeg Arena)
• Number of ownership groups with a plausible business plan in Winnipeg: 0
• Number of ownership groups with a plausible business plan in Phoenix: 1

As I’ve said over and over, the best comparison for the Jets' situation in 1995 is that of the Seattle SuperSonics in 2006 (pre-Bennett purchase). The fans were more or less present, although not exactly filling their small, outdated arena for some bad hockey teams. Civic willingness to spend money on a modern arena, though, was not.

And that’s what makes the continuing “Phoenix stole Canada’s team, let’s steal it back” narrative so infuriating. It’s a pile of ahistorical assertions (and the usual gross misunderstanding of Gary Bettman’s actual job) stacked chest high, leavened with ignorance of the demographic stagnation-to-decline of the Canadian prairie, and topped off with misguided triumphalism. Those of us in remaining Sun Belt markets will have to batten down the hatches for more of the same, too. Monday’s Ken Campbell column tossing out half-baked assertions about LA and Carolina ownership turnover was just a foretaste.

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Archived here from my original FanPost at EDSBS.

Sure, it's basically impossible to defend the BCS in its current form. But a playoff would be a definite improvement for two constituencies: fans of the 6-8 schools that (with varying degrees of confidence/lunacy) count on being in the national championship picture every year and want clear title to their prize, and people who casually/passively watch college football on television the same way they do pro sports.

Who's left out? Pretty much everyone else.

Despite the increasingly inaccurately-named Bowl Week and its parade of 7-5 Sun Belt squads versus 6-6 MACsters watering down the product, bowls are one of college football's longest and proudest traditions -- and one of the most enjoyable for the fans who follow their schools to these games, the same fans who make annual donations and buy season tickets to fund the whole operation. Television guy neither knows nor cares about these people, except that his show seems oddly less compelling when they stop showing up for reasons he doesn't understand.

Each season, 20-30 teams who wouldn't qualify for any practical playoff scenario actually earn (rather than fall into) a chance to close a season out right with some modicum of attention paid, at a showcase bowl in a warm, compelling destination. (Or Jacksonville, the eternal exception.) But if you expect non-playoff bowls to draw any media attention at the same time as the titans play quote-unquote "meaningful games" for three or more weeks in a row, you're kidding yourself -- and that attention is the sine qua non of continued existence for these games.

Bowl games are college football's cultural distinctive, and by providing a reachable goal, the best of them support an entire tier of aspirational programs. If winning an undisputed championship is the only thing that matters, and you're certain you'll always be in that discussion, sure, go ahead and advocate a playoff. But understand what you're throwing away, and who it matters to most.

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The New York Times’s TV sports columnist Richard Sandomir examines how showing a complete sporting event is antithetical to NBC’s Olympic programming concept.

A hockey game cannot be sliced easily into a series of short events, like ski or luge runs, figure skating programs or speedskating races. If the network cannot chop a sport into two-to-five-minute elements framed with a lot of ads, it is not likely to be shown from 7 p.m. to midnight.

A hockey game lasts at least two and a half hours. NBC never spends two and a half hours on any sport during the Winter or Summer Games.

The catch is that NBC doesn’t pay a price for this against the credibility of its mainstream sports programming, because NBC has no such long-term sports programming to speak of. One NFL game a week and the dying gasps of Notre Dame football — that’s it. NBC presents as little NHL hockey as it can possibly get away with, selecting from a seven-team menu, and abuses Wimbledon fans nearly as badly as it does hockey fans.

At this point, I’m openly rooting for ESPN/ABC to win the U.S. Olympic rights, despite my concern with their dominance of the country’s sports media landscape and the mistreatment they give competing properties. The reason is that credibility in sports coverage is their raison d'être — they have to present a sporting event as a sporting event, or risk staining other, valuable properties of theirs. Mainline ABC can still have a clip show similar to NBC’s current programming. But I’d expect ESPN to use its other six-plus channels (most of which are or will be available nationwide in HD) to run all event coverage live in its entirety, preserving the integrity of the events, and source its mainline live cut-ins (if timezones allow) or extended highlights packages from these.

Event embargoes, though, should be gone in the ESPN/ABC Olympic world, and for that we all would be thankful. Embargoes insult every viewer who takes more than a casual interest in the competition — and ESPN, unlike NBC, needs these people to be happy once the flame is doused and the flag put away.

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With President Obama "throwing his weight around" this week as he promised immediately after his election, we're back to the BCS/playoff debate. Abuse of the presidential bully pulpit aside, I think replacing the BCS with a playoff would destroy college football as we know it. In my perception, three distinct constituencies want a playoff for mostly distinct reasons:

• Fans of high-profile teams not in the BCS conferences, for the obvious reason that their teams can't make the BCS championship game; their conference schedules aren't good enough, and rarely can they schedule enough quality out-of-conference games to cover for it. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT), whose state has two such teams, has abused his own bully pulpit for years on this group's behalf.
• Fans of the 6 to 8 teams that can count on contending for the national championship nearly every season. They're tired of (a) not having a clearly defined path to the championship game before the season begins, and (b) even if they do make it, having their credentials challenged by talking heads taking the cause of the first group.
• People that watch college football on television and have either never been to a game or only went to home games in their student days. They don't understand why I-A football can't act like NCAA basketball or pro football and give them playoffs to gamble on watch on the same weekday at the same time every year.  

Group one we can give a pass to. They're operating on pure self-interest. The others, though? Not so much.

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Straight off the UPS truck this afternoon: my new Garmin 265WT GPS, complete with Bluetooth phone dialing. Information on the Internet about the 2x5 series’s interaction with Palm OS Treos like my Sprint Treo 755p or the Centro is lacking, perhaps because we PalmOS users are the pathetic stragglers of the smartphone world.

Be that as it may, I still wanted to get as much connected use out of these guys as I could. So, here’s what I’ve found that this combination can and can’t do, categorized by appearance on the Garmin.

• Voice Dial is a no-go. Known limitation of PalmOS with all Bluetooth devices. The only way this would work is if the voice recognition were on-board the GPS, which it isn’t.
• Call History works, no problems. Of course, this is probably the least important feature to have on-screen.
• Call Home has nothing to do with any entry on the Palm. This number is set independently.
• Phone Book pulls from the Favorites buttons within the Phone application. This pull happens about a minute after you turn the GPS on and it pairs with your phone. This is, unfortunately, not the same set of numbers as your Palm OS Contacts (the database that gets synchronized with Address Book.app, Outlook, or Palm Desktop per your platform preference). The only workaround is to load most of the numbers you’re likely to call from the Garmin onto page 4 or 5 of the Favorites (where you won’t see them in ordinary operation); you don’t need to set a speed dial key. The primary problem is that the Favorites number won’t change if you change the corresponding number in the Contacts database.
• Even when dialing from the Garmin, keep your phone at hand. The Garmin should display a red phone handset icon at top-right while you’re on a call; tapping this icon doesn’t hang up, though, but instead takes you to a call status screen. One more tap is required on that screen to hang up. Easier to grab your phone and hit the End button.

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Giving the SBNation FanPost facility a tryout, I posted a little humorous column at Canes Country to provide it a wider audience. Comment here or there, or read the local archive below.

Walking the halls of the RBC Center, we’ve all wondered at times how to make character inferences from the Hurricanes replica jersey you so lovingly sport. Well, this admittedly incomplete post is here to help. Read on and learn.

Eric Staal (with 06 SCF patch or 2006+ with assistant captain’s A), Rod Brind'Amour (2005+ with captain’s C), Erik Cole (any age, male wearer): you are a Carolina Hurricanes fan with enough money to invest in a personalized jersey.

Ron Francis, Staal/Brind'Amour (older): the Igor Larionov-in-3OT flashbacks never really go away, but 2006 made them a lot easier to deal with.

Erik Cole (female wearer): helLOOOOOOOO, puck bunny!

Cam Ward: you are eight or nine years old, and your parents have been told that he’s the grandson of a preacher and a good role model. Your parents know little about hockey, though, and even less of the common mental state of goaltenders. This will come back to bite them when you reach high school.

Tuomo Ruutu: you’d had your eye on it for about a year, but finally committed the $180 and retired your old Cole jersey to the attic a week before the 2009 trade deadline.

Chad LaRose: look, buddy, when you’re 275 pounds, you shouldn’t buy a jersey that makes people wonder whether you ate the midget that made it famous.

Justin Williams: you’ve had season tickets for several seasons, you kept the faith through the lean years, gritted your teeth through injury after injury to your boy, and this is how JR rewards you? People trying to sneak hard liquor through the security checkpoint should ask you for advice.

Brandon Sutter: this isn’t your first jersey purchase, and you’ve watched a lot of hockey. Problem is, nobody who sees you at the rink knows whether the one hanging in your closet is Tanabe (bad) or Dineen (good).

Joe Corvo: Italian or from Fayetteville, quite possibly both. Far, far more willing to resort to physical violence than Corvo himself is on the ice.

Jussi Jokinen: you moved to Raleigh and/or discovered the existence of hockey in the spring of 2009 — or there’s a bit of repressed Dallas Stars fandom in you. You kinda like the shootout, but after the reaction you got from Sutter/Dineen guy, you’re careful about who you share that with.

with apologies to the genre-defining Lookout Landing post

(and additions prompted by the comments:)

Tim Gleason: if you ever met Jack Johnson, you’d punch him. That goes for the singer, too.

Josef Vasicek: occasionally, late at night, you go back into the dark corners of your hard drive and find that carefully-preserved set of late-night e-mails from college with the girl you thought you might marry one day. Though it didn’t work out the way you planned, and you’re not upset with how your life has gone since, thinking back to those more innocent days still makes you smile. You hope she’s happy too.

Keith Primeau: while JoVa guy was surviving on Mountain Dew, Ramen and dreams, you were making big decisions about your financial future. What kind of numbskull would invest in an online bookstore named after a river in Brazil, anyway? Pets.com is the kind of business that’ll set a guy up for life!

Pavel Brendl: mmmmm, forbidden donut.

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