| | St. Louis is one lucky burg. True, it isn't lucky like, say, Nice, or
Florence, or Milwaukee, but life isn't all beachfront property, wonderful art
or bratwurst.
|  | | Scott Young raises his arms during the Blues' Game 6 victory. |
What St. Louis has is a seventh game.
Laugh if you must, especially if you know more about the Blues and San
Jose Sharks than you ought to, but the fact is that a seventh game is about
as close to heaven as man can devise -- again, with the possible exception
of bratwurst.
In this case, the Blues are trying to defend their town's honor by
avoiding the shame and degradation of being the first team of the new decade
to win the President's Trophy and get knocked out of the playoffs in the
first round. To do so, they must win Tuesday night's seventh game of the
Western Conference first-round showdown with the relentlessly screwy
Sharks.
This would also make them the first team in global history to spot an
opponent three wins and win the series -- in successive years. We'll just
have to assume that coach Joel Quenneville isn't planning a Chuck E. Cheese party
for the fellows for that accomplishment.
But this isn't about the players anyway. This is about you, and you, and
you over there, standing outside the bathroom and waiting for the line to
move.
This is about your God-given right to enjoy at least one seven-game
series each and every spring, even if it is played between two teams you
couldn't know or care less about. A seventh game is its own raison d'être,
and its own reward.
And nothing whatsoever, not even Jennifer Lopez putting in your new
garage door opener, beats overtime in a seventh game.
The NHL has been mildly stingy with seventh games the last few years ---
only nine in the last four years. And some old-timers hearken back to 1977,
the last time there were none. That was also the year that
weasels commingled with hens, Pope Paul VI held his famous Come As Your
Favorite Member Of Abba costume party for the Vatican office staff, and
Leonid Brezhnev was voted World's Sexiest Man by People Magazine.
Coincidence, or something more sinister?
But we digress. Back to this seventh game thing. If it seems like sort
of an odd fetish to have, well, consider those three hours. Millionaires,
near-millionaires and raw rookies are as one, and all of them are required to
play as though their homes were burning down across town. They play with a
hyperkineticism that translates even on television, which to date has been
the place where hockey goes to die.
And all you need is a sandwich at the ready, a small cooler
and the kids in bed, fuming that once again they had been screwed out of
their right to watch Noggin.
Now that, ladies and gentlemen, is why we fought World War II.
Now there is also the possibility that Ottawa and Toronto will give us
what we free citizens demand. The Senators must beat their anglophonic
Ontario brethren Monday evening to deliver a seventh game even better than
the Blues-Sharks. A seventh game between the only two surviving Canadian teams,
especially between the two cities who only grudgingly share the same
province, would be a triumph of good taste and bad mood.
The last time two Canadian teams met in the playoffs was 1994, when
Vancouver beat both Calgary and then Toronto to become the last Canadian team
to reach the Stanley Cup final. Both those series ended gloriously, with the
Canucks beating Toronto in a double overtime fifth game nearly a month after
beating the Flames in a double-overtime seventh game.
That game made any of the games the Canucks played against the New York
Rangers in the finals seem like a round of Go Fish -- 54 years of Ranger-less
Cup history be damned.
The point is, there isn't much theater that beats a seventh game. It is
the best entertainment buy still extant, because you don't have to buy a $75
jersey, a $30 fitted cap, a $22 foam finger or a $7 beverage to get it. You
don't have to subscribe to The Hockey News, have a Canadian relative or think
that Barry Melrose is cute. You sit, you watch, and you instantly
understand.
Either that, or you waste your life wiping Cheetos crumbs off your shirt
and waiting for Ms. Lopez to show up packing a tool box and a work order.
True, if she does show up, you've got yourself a story to tell for the
next 40 years. But you'd do better to play the percentages and belly up to
the tube Tuesday night. Life could be a
whole lot worse, even if you look like Leonid Brezhnev.
Ray Ratto, a columnist for the San Francisco Examiner, is a regular contributor to ESPN.com. | |
ALSO SEE
ESPN.com's NHL Playoffs coverage
|
