Plus/Minus: And there goes the preseason

The Habs' preseason ended on a high note, and now they can happily go off to their out-of-town team bonding sleepaway camp thing. Or, as I call it, "last chance to wear sweatpants in public."

BETTER THAN KNOWING THAT REAL HOCKEY IS AROUND THE CORNER

Welcome back, boys

+ What a great way for the Habs to end their preseason: with a solid win. Scott Gomez is playing like the player he needs to be. Seeing Josh Gorges and Max Pacioretty back on the ice, right before, nearly brought me to tears. Seeing Josh Gorges wear an A on his jersey nearly made me do a spit take, in the best of ways.

+ Last week, I forgot to comment on RDS' addition of Marc Denis between the benches. He replaces Joel Bouchard, who kind of had tunnel vision and needed to conduct most of his interviews in a language that he didn't speak as well as he thought he did. Marc Denis seems at ease in his new role, less nervous on camera than he usually is on RDS, and has very good English interview skills.
+ Josh Gorges is a superhero. I'm sure of it. 

+ I love you, Brian Gionta.

+ Robyn, aka LadyHabs, is even more jazzed about this than I am, but it has to be said: There seems to be a really good sense of team spirit right now. Players are sticking up for each other in the face of evils such as Ryan Malone.

TV + Casey Wilson is absolute perfection on Happy Endings.
+ New Girl picked up the first full-season renewal this fall, and it's a match made in heaven: 24 episodes of a show that's fun to watch and needs a little more time to reach its full potential. It might be too early in the season to say so, but so far I think Fox's Tuesday night lineup is my favourite night of TV. Why does hockey have to be on at the same time?

WORSE THAN KNOWING THE "IT'S ONLY PRESEASON" ARGUMENT WON'T WORK ON ANGRY PEOPLE ANYMORE

- That picture up there? That's a page from the special Canadiens section of an issue of the Metro newspaper this week in Montreal. (It's a free newspaper, handed out at metro stations all over the city.) It's basically a guide on where to go to see Habs players off the ice, compiled by a blogger who would know all about that since he's got papparazzi and restaurant connections all over the city. It's disrespectful. Yes, I know, I make the "last chance to wear sweatpants in public" joke every year, but that's based on my belief that you never know when you'll be at a restaurant or a pharmacy or wherever and run into a Habs player out of sheer luck. For someone who already does enough snooping and creeping online to use a mainstream media outlet (and a free one, at that) to further try and invade whatever privacy our boys have left is beyond presumptuous.

- Oh, Wayne Simmonds. You can't be the victim of intolerance one week and go throwing slurs at people the next. As I said in Thursday's post, we all need to change the way we interact. 

TV - So... The X Factor really is on, like, every day but Tuesday, isn't it? (love you, Fox Tuesday!)

- Can we talk about how New Lily on Modern Family can suddenly speak in full sentences? Did the show skip ahead further in time than I thought, or has Cameron been, like, giving her those Rise of the Planet of the Apes injections or something? I know that the ability to give Lily dialogue mines her comic potential a little deeper than previously possible, but it just doesn't make sense that she's suddenly verbose.

- Why is Pan Am about, like, ten different things, and why does it make me not want to live in the sixties anymore? 

Lately I've been having trouble sleeping through the night if I'm too excited for something. It's Sunday and hockey starts on Thursday. This is going to be a long week.