Saturday, May 05, 2007

Following hockey, the minimalist way

In our home we don't have cable, so unless the hockey games are on one of the national networks or I'm someplace that does have cable, I can't watch the games. Thus, a lot of times when the Sabres are playing an important game, my general way of following the game is to go to the individual page for that particular game and hit "refresh" every minute or so. (Yeah, the individual game pages have automatic refresh, but where's the fun in that?)

So last night I'm doing this, and I had added incentive as I was attending the 10:45 showing of Spiderman 3 with a friend from work who was actually at the game itself. And I'm hitting "refresh" all throughout, and the game is in a 0-0 tie through all the first period, all the second period, and just about all of the third period. Now, we'd already been hoping that the game would end in regulation so they'd be able to get from the arena to the Regal Cinemas in my neck o' the woods, so the prospect of a scoreless tie in regulation was a clear complication to our plans.

At about 9:30 or so, I again refreshed and saw that with about twenty seconds or so to go, the score was now 1-0. Yay, they might get out of there on time for the movie! But wait -- it wasn't 1-0 Sabres, it was 1-0 Rangers with less than twenty seconds to go. Boo! And then I hit refresh less than a minute later, and it's 1-1 with about five seconds left! Yay Sabres! But now we're going to overtime, screwing up the movie plan! Boo!

Luckily, the game ended fairly quickly in OT when Maxim Affinnegennoff (pretty sure I spelled that wrong) scored the game-winner, and then it was off to the theater, where I awaited the arrival of the friend from work and his friend who apparently drove at point five past light speed to get there while the previews were still scrolling.

Funny tales from the game, via my co-worker:

:: When the Rangers scored to take the 1-0 lead with less than twenty seconds to go, apparently a bunch of people in the row in front of him got up and made their hasty exit from the arena. Oops.

:: Apparently the Sabres run a scroll of names on their Jumbotron scoreboard during games congratulating people on birthdays, and apparently one of the names submitted -- and run -- at last night's game was "Jacques Strape". Oops. Shades of Heywood Jablome.

Anyhow, Go Sabres!

2 comments:

teflonjedi said...

I am in a similar, yet worse, boat over here in China. They don't show hockey at all over here. (Basketball and international soccer are another matter.) So, I usually pull in the games via webcasts of the radio station covering the game. But, given vacation time and all, this past week it was worse, and I ended up sending an SMS out of China to a fellow Canadian, just to find out that the Canucks were losing their series against Anaheim. Ah well...

Anonymous said...

I remember one night years ago while working in the grocery store, there was a gorgeous blonde working at the service counter and answering the phones. One of the callers asked her to page "Amanda Hugginkiss". She made the page, twice, and on the second time turned beet red as one of our male coworkers walked up to the service counter answering the page with the line "Here I am, where do you want me?"

Chris