12 Things I Liked In 2012

In no particular order:

Carey Price at the All Star Game.

P.K. Subban being a celebrity off the ice: from his appearance on Strombo to his fundraising efforts to his new job as a SportsNet analyst. All of it.

NHL players making their yearly holiday visit to children's hospitals despite having no obligation to do so.

Saturday Night Live knowing both when and how to be serious: the children's choir singing Silent Night in honour of the victims of the shooting in Connecticut, the adorable send-off for Kristen Wiig, and the simple memorial for the Beastie Boys' Adam Yauch after he died: just a clip from a past episode where they performed "Sure Shot," in which he calls out the hip-hop world on their disrespectful treatment of women.

The second season of Episodes, which could have been a disaster but was just as awkwardly funny as the first, and a welcome change from most other summer TV programming.

The time I met Jack McBrayer. (Not so much met, as saw him, walked past him, said "Hi welcome to Montreal I'm a huge fan" and he thanked me and walked away and I freaked out a little.)

The time I met Adam Baldwin. (I don't think I met any hockey players this year. Sadly.)

The fact that I got to see this Key & Peele sketch performed live, and now everyone knows how funny it is.

The Habs drafting Alex Galchenyuk, and then the 2012 NHL Draft ending promptly after that, and the Bruins didn't draft anyone. (For the sake of pageviews, I'll mention his name a few more times. Galchenyuk. Alex Galchenyuk, good Gally miss Molly.)

The opening scene of the Mindy Project's pilot episode. A bunch of people didn't like it, and then begrudgingly admitted in, like, DECEMBER that the show was getting better. Clearly they didn't see the same pilot I did. (Honourable mention to Ben & Kate, which did actually have an awful pilot episode, but won me over when I gave it a second chance.)

The AHL games at the Bell Centre that brought Ben Maxwell and J.T. Wyman back to town, and introduced me to my new silent enemy, Eddie Pasquale.

Knowing that I'd see hockey, even if there was a lockout, even if I was out of the country. Two of the first things I saw when I arrived in Italy in October: a guy wearing a Detroit Red Wings track suit, and a store whose windows were dressed with pictures of the Vancouver riot couple. I am not making this up. (One of the first things I heard was a Chuck Berry song on the loudspeakers at a train station. Italy is a weird and wonderful place.)

Oh, and a 13th for good luck: Basketball.

Wow, when I look at it this way, 2012 wasn't a complete bore. Then why am I so glad that this year finally moved its lazy ass out of my way?
Best wishes to all of my readers (all one of you) for a happy and, most importantly, healthy new year.

2011: All these things that I've done

Lately there's been a lot of pessimism among Habs fans, myself included. I'm usually as optimistic as I possibly can be about sports, so this is kind of strange and new to me. But 2011 wasn't the easiest year I've seen in my brief time so far as a sports fan. It started out well enough - I worked on my 2010 year-in-review post in sunny Florida. Unfortunately, vacations (like all things) come to an end, players get injured, games are lost, and sometimes the worst happens.

I'm trying not to think of 2011 as the year where [insert bad thing that happened]. So many other great things happened this year that I'll be happy to remember:

I went to my first-ever football game...
And my first-ever basketball game...
Where I got to be on the Jumbotron - which is every sports fan's dream, right?

Despite my lack of athletic prowess, this was the year that I tried to play a sport. (I was bad at it, but that's okay because I'm proud of myself for trying, and golf isn't really that great of a sport anyway.)

At one point this year, I owned T-shirts for teams in all 4 major North American sports teams. (And I probably still do, but one of them has gone missing.)
Maybe I should up that number to 5, now that soccer is increasing in popularity and the Impact are joining the MLS and have snazzy new uniforms.

This was the year I met Ken Dryden, Yvon Lambert, and Chris Nilan.
And Michel Lacroix.
And Hal Gill, sort of.
This was the year that Jonathan Toews looked at me.

This was the year that I went to my first playoff game - and while I sniffled and coughed through the whole thing, I booed the Bruins as much as my sore throat would allow.
This was also the year that I screamed so much at a hockey game that it gave me a sore throat.
This was the year I got to see Bell Centre celebrity Logan win "fan of the game."

This was the year that I got to be a bet commissioner on live radio. (But not a slap bet commissioner - the stakes were too high. I would have been responsible for Moe Khan getting slapped by a CFL player, and there's no way I'm mean enough to do that.)

This was the year that I started a Twitter hashtag that started trending, and became so popular that even famous people got in on the fun and newspapers wrote about it.

This was the year that I saw the Stanley Cup. And yeah, maybe I kissed it. But that was in April, when it belonged to the Blackhawks, so it's okay.
This was the year that I found out what it's like to be a Habs fan in Toronto. But that was in April, before the Leafs started getting their act together.

This was the year that the good guys won the Super Bowl and the NBA Championship.
This was the year that the Florida Panthers stopped being where NHL players go when they've been bad.
This was the year that Saku Koivu returned to Montreal as a hero.


Even though Mick Jagger had already told me, this was the year I learned that you can't always get what you want. But if you try sometimes, you just might find you get what you need.
Happy 2012, everyone.

11 Things I Liked This Year

This is a really lazy year-in-review (a better one is forthcoming), what with all the "real" blogs and journalists making very specific Best Of lists and actually ranking things. Still, all that matters is that there were things worth liking this year, regardless of what some pessimists would have you believe. In no particular order:


MTL Stand Up by Annakin Slayd - We couldn't ask for a better song about being Canadiens fans.

P.K. Subban's hat trick - We knew he had it in him. No matter what anyone says or how many shutouts followed, that game against Minnesota was brilliant.

Bruins athletic trainer Don Del Negro helping the Habs staff while Max Pacioretty lay on the ice and everyone at home wrung their hands - so much classier than any of us would have expected.


HBO 24/7 - both seasons of it, since there's some New Year's overlap. Everything about the show is beautiful.

Cameo by Brent Musburger. Sports!

Happy Endings - I probably rave about this show a little too much, but think about it... None of the actors or the creator had really anchored a show before, and the biggest star in the cast when it premiered was Elisha Cuthbert. (No way did I ever expect to love, or even watch, a show with Elisha Cuthbert on it.) But the show grew quickly into a quirky, hip, hysterical comedy that eclipses its lead-in Modern Family.

Nicki Minaj - This really was a 2011 thing, because I paid NO attention to her at the end of 2010. Then as soon as 2011 started, as if by magic, Nicki was everywhere I turned: her songs were on the radio, she was great on SNL, I heard her songs during sports games... Heck, she's got her own line of nail polish. Everything about Nicki is genuinely crazy, and I wouldn't want it to be any other way.

Vancouver citizens cleaning up their city after the riots.

Hal Gill - what's not to love? He adds some much-needed size to the team, has blocked approximately four thousand shots this year, made us laugh on Twitter, and was a fantastic Movember team captain.

Arcade Fire - winning a much-deserved Album of the Year Grammy (haters be damned) and performing for free at Place des Festivals. Can they have a free show at Place des Festivals every year?

Scandals of Classic Hollywood - a semi-regular feature on The Hairpin, which I could read over and over and over again. I'm linking to the Elizabeth Taylor story, but they're all great. So gossipy and so educational!

The NHL Mean Girls hashtag on Twitter - hysterical. It combined two things that I thoroughly enjoy, and there was an entire part of Twitter's hockey population that didn't get it. Poor them.

The year was full of surprises, most of which I'll probably elaborate on in my next post. What did YOU like this year?

The year that was, the year that will be.

You're probably all missing Rookie right now, as I am not the most reliable of bloggers seeing as I have missed just about the last ...oh, five games in a row due to the holidays and really, just not being around. I even betrayed you all for a bit by entering the ACC at the same time the Habs were set to face off against Dallas. Note that missing this much hasn't happened in the last twelve years, which either says something about my poker-playing skills or bad train-scheduling abilities.

But the Habs haven't exactly made me feel terrible about missing their frustrating, heart-wrenching, goal-starved performances. My phone has almost been choked to death the number of times I refresh my GameCenter app, hoping it's lying to me. I get back in the car on the way home and callers always seem to be on the verge of becoming clone artists of Angry Sal. It's upsetting and certainly unsettling that this is what they're going through, but maybe sitting these games out is what allows me not to want to panic, and be almost alone in that boat.

Or maybe it's the experience. 1998 was not your bandwagon 2004 year by any means, and that's when I came on board. AKA slumps like these are not the worst I've seen.

This. This is probably the worst thing I've seen.

This year marked a lot of things for the Bleu-Blanc-Rouge, which can (and should be) called upon to remember in times like these:

• Injuries, callups, demotions. Andrei Kostitsyn had knee surgery and Max Pacioretty ...he was just plain not ready. Despite all the flack he gets, Kostitsyn is still third in team scoring and leads with +9, whereas Pacioretty, after his excellent start in the AHL this season, was the lone guy to get on the board for the Habs last night.
• More injuries. The world seemed to end when Mike Cammalleri showed up in crutches to practice that day in February. Despite missing 17 games, he came back just in time for the playoffs and was instrumental in the Habs' run with 19 points in 19 games, 13 of them goals.

(But first we had to see him in That Suit. The one that did not look one bit like this one, unfortunately.)

• Pierre Gauthier named General Manager. In what can at best be called a bizarre move at a time no one expected anything from Bob Gainey, much less him stepping down, a new/old face stepped up to fill the void leaving Habs' fans more confused than before. He still gets questioned on a daily basis, but now it's "that Gauthier" instead of "that Gainey." More on what he HAS done later, though.
• Mid-February: P.K. Subban called up. His status then was God, with 39 points, a +29 and having all sorts of roles in record-breakers in Hamilton. His status now... not so much. I'm about to quote a girly movie, and I won't tell you which one, but we have to remember what used to be good, otherwise we won't recognize it if it hits us between the eyes.
• 24/7 has nothing on us. Possibly the best thing to happen to both the Penguins and the Capitals was facing the Habs in the playoffs this season. The two seven-game series were supposed to come out with different victors, but when does what's SUPPOSED to happen actually happen, anyway?
• Halaknophobia. Which is quite possibly the most amusing headline Canadiens.com has ever come up with, seeing as they're not Rookie. Who can forget the stop-signs and the walls and agent drama and goalie drama and putting that aside and just winning, for goodness' sake, and winning big. In the regular season, in the playoffs, bringing with it the hero status and The Trade. Oh no.
  
  
• And Pierre Gauthier's move eventually makes some bit of sense. The re-signing of Tomas Plekanec to a six year deal, keeping the guy who's currently leading the Canadiens in scoring where he should be and where he always pictured himself being despite the temptations of free-agency. It's a move that validates itself every day.
• Marc-Andre Bergeron: not re-signed. And thank your lucky stars. Could you imagine the state of the current D when he's what you have to rely on? Not that the suggestion won't be brought up again in these times of so-called peril #JustSayNo
• Guy Boucher named AHL Coach of the Year...only to wind up in Tampa Bay. And that's the last reference to last night's game that I think I'm going to safely be able to use in this post. But you have to admit it has enough bite to act as a motivator. Right? Right?
• Dan Ellis and Dustin Boyd to Montreal for S. Kostitsyn. Harsh critiques and Twitter-wars of massive proportions ensued in what would ordinarily be considered the least blockbuster-esque move in pre-July 1st history. Now, slowly but surely, Kostitsyn has found his niche in Nashville, which at least some of us wished for him (and even those that didn't can take solace in the fact that he's so far from this division it doesn't even matter), whereas Carey Price didn't even need Ellis, and Dustin Boyd, after a tumultuous heart-breaking series of waiver-trips, has exploded for ten goals in the AHL's longest goal-streak this season.
• Finally, a Captain. Brian Gionta was given the 'C', becoming the 28th player to wear it in the Habs' history. He now leads the team in goals (tied with Cammalleri) with 12 and shots with 150 (where he's also eighth in the whole league).
• Markov out again. Emphasis on again, because that word implies that it's happened before. It's starting to be felt only as of late, even if people might forget it happened back in November. That in itself is how far this team has come. Josh Gorges joins him now, and that's going to hurt more, but with injuries to the D comes the reminder of the LAST line of defense, which leads to...
• The resurgence of Carey Price. First stars and Molson Cups aplenty for the guy most had given up on last season, including him in trade rumours of the worst kind that are hopefully documented in many places where we can laugh at them. Who's that guy that didn't even make it to the All Star Ballot and is only behind--who is it? Marc-Andre Fleury in the goalie slot? Hmm.

I'm set to miss a sixth game in a row, unless Santa brought my grandfather RDS and didn't tell him about it. I'm going to go with no. And tonight the opponents are the Florida Panthers. Despite it being the second half of a back-to-back, call it just a little hunch that this team isn't about to surrender a 2010-ending W that easily.