The road back

It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were. And sometimes you didn't want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it's only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn't. They kept going. Because they were holding on to something.

Why quote this monologue of Samwise Gamgee's from The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers? Well:



One down. Three to go.

I know, there's no chance it can happen. But there is a chance, isn't there? Sure there is.

And if that bit of movie dialog seems a bit overblown for something so prosaic as a hockey game, howzabout this:

When I first came here, this was all swamp. Everyone said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built in all the same, just to show them. It sank into the swamp. So I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So I built a third. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp. But the fourth one stayed up.

Those first three games? The castles that sank into the swamp.

OK, I'm stretching here. But still: one win is in, and the Sabres have home ice for two of the remaining three that they have to win.

(BTW, I was listening to Mike Schopp and the Bulldog this afternoon -- for you non-Buffalo folks, those are two sports radio guys -- and Bulldog made the point that the only real hope he was clinging to was the admitted stretch that the Boston Red Sox pulled off a comeback from a 3-0 deficit in the American League Championship Series in 2004. Schopp rejected this, on the basis that hockey is completely different from baseball in that the key matchups pretty much stay the same from one hockey game to the next, where in baseball, in the next game you always have a new pitcher for the next game; and therefore, series momentum means far more in hockey than it does in baseball.

But if that's the case, shouldn't baseball have seen more than one example of a team coming back from a 3-0 series deficit in its hundred-plus year history? Prior to the Sox doing it in 2004, there were only two instances of teams coming back from such a deficit in a best-of-seven series in all of pro sports. Those two were in...hockey.)