Spring Awakening

Well then.

A week ago we were still floating on air. The weather was gorgeous and sunny and I zipped up to Duluth for the little celebration thingy they had at AMSoil Arena. (Every time I type AMSoil on this site I get a bunch of spammy emails asking about AMSoil as a product. Dude, it's got mad viscosity. Anyway, their $25 million was well spent on all the mentions they get on RWD.) Yes, I used a whole tank of precious gasoline to drive up for a nice, sweet, touching little speechytime and then THREE AND A HALF HOURS OF LINE-WAITING.

I'm very dedicated.

I did have a little kissy-kissy session with the trophy. Wheeee!! With my horrible hair.

















Yikes. Scariness. Good thing it's a little blurry.

So things went well in the line, once we FINALLY got to the team. I had a nice conversation with Montgomery where we talked about graduating and how excited he was to get his degree and then he complimented me on my sartorial selections. As you can see above, I had on a Nirvana t-shirt that I bought at Target in the men's department for like $10. Monty is like one of the only guys on the team old enough to actually know who Nirvana is, possibly. They were my favourite band in junior high. I love grunge.

So, I felt really great about how things went. My horrible fear of making a giant ass of myself was assuaged. The only thing we have to fear is fear itself, yo. Then I had totally normal conversations with MCON, Fonz, Basaraba, Oleksuk (ok maybe that was a little geeky but well within my tolerance level) and possibly others, and then some of the guys just sort of said hi and signed. I asked Grun for some pizza. He told me Flaherty got pizza sauce on some posters.

Then I started talking to Ginger Goalie Gaffy about his hair and somehow that ended up as a discussion of my horrible hear and how it was breaking off. Which it is, I really ruined it, whatever, that's not the point, who the heck wants to actually hear about that? It's like talking about picking scabs or foot fungus or something.

Then I had my final chance to talk to Faulk and get him to sign the WJC jersey I got. So I tried to tell him the story of how I had to bid on the white jersey while Hoffman bid on the blue jersey and I got the story all twisted round and somehow in the middle of it he was saying that he didn't think one of the jerseys he got was game worn because he got one and then I said "Well, you can smell it."

I should not be let out in public.

I also tried to make a mockery of the actuarial joke made by the chancellor during the speeches and instead my story of another awkward actuarial joke (or rather a series of them) by someone called Uncle Pete ended up being such a bad story that I looked even more like an ass to Kyle Schmidt than I did with Justin Faulk. Maybe. I'm not sure. I would take a poll but there were few witnesses.

In short, I should really not be let out in public.

Justin Fontaine has finally signed with the Wild. Just as I implored back in July or whenever, because I'm brilliant.

And we are potentially facing college hockey Armageddon. Though I really don't think it will be as bad as the word doomsdayers think. We'll talk more later, but it is incredibly depressing to follow up the national championship with the imminent loss of a coach and the far-fetched but still pesky rumour we may lose our conference as well.