Hockey Season Canceled, Unkissed Sisters Upset

Well, what can you say?

I'll tell you what you can say: what a bunch of fuckups and shitheads. Imagine, a collection of grown men being that stupid...it boggles the mind. The NHL will never return, it seems, because nobody cared about it leaving. If the lockout extends into next season, there will be no replacement players, because all the players there are already play somewhere--mostly in Europe, if they have talent. On this side of the pond, we can already watch the best (active) players in the minors for next to nothing. Who would pay $70 to watch an AHL player in an NHL sweater?

The league is totally screwed.

Good thing, too. Now hockey can once again become a regional sport, which is all it ever claimed to be anyway. Think about it. Hockey isn't "America's Pastime" (baseball), "America's Game" (NFL football), "The World's Game" (soccer [shudder]), or even the "Urban Males' Game" (NBA baketball--which, by the way, sucks). Hockey is the Canucks' frozen white northern funny accent game. And that's a mighty specialized market. I'm sure chauvenism has something to do with our indifference over the loss of a beautiful game; if baseball had been invented in France (just to give you rightwing fucktards something to wrap your gummy little minds around), would it have survived a strike? Hell no. Not now.

But regional sports might be a good way to go. Every damn sport is overextended, overexpanded, and overexposed anyway. The NBA is in free fall, MLB is about to go into the crapper along with Barry Bonds' legacy, the NFL is plateauing after years of upward growth. Even NASCAR is feeling a backlash from its core fans who resent the taking of races from Rockingham, NC to give them to a half-full raceway in the Nevada desert. What the fuck does Nevada know about moonshine running or a 396 with a Webber 4 barrel? Not a damn thing, clearly.

Who "does" football really well? Florida, Alabama, Texas, and maybe some of the cornbelt states. Baseball? Texas, California, and the Deep South. Basketball? The South again, if you like skill; the Midwest if you like hockey on hardwood; the West coast if you prefer no D. It's regional, people. NASCAR? Purely southern, with Indiana as an honorary member of the New Confederacy (hell, they were damn near being in the old Confederacy). Soccer? I would hope that nobody would want to be known as the home region for soccer, but let's give it to the preppies in the northeastern US.

And hockey? Midwest, Northeast, and Canada. That's it. Iron cities/golden horsehoe and above.

This is a great plan. Again, and for the first time in a long time, you can wonder at the variety of the North American experience. "What's life like in Missouri?" "Goddamn, I have no idea!..."...wouldn't that be cool? You might actually have to GO to Pittsburgh to see a warehouse apartment building; or Kansas to see a farmer; or Vancouver to see a hockey game. I for one don't want to know everything about everybody all the goddamn time. I want a little variety, mystery, and the like. I hate Chili's and Target and Cosmopolitan magazine, because they need us to believe that everything is the same everywhere. That's the price of our souls.

Besides, who wants to see bad hockey in Miami? That just plain sucks.