What a Shitty Time to Empathize With Sharks: Habs 3 - Endangered Sharks 2

Isn't he adorable?

I have found a place and it is good, and it is beautiful and it is heavenly. It's called Chez Serge. It's a tavern on the Main in Montreal. They have tons of HD screens, far more than necessary, but you can never have too many HD screens. They have scores of die-hard fans in Habs jerseys. The single ones will be happy to know that one can try one's pick-up lines there and have some success. You just better be cheering for the right team. 

The place is awesome and I'm never going to watch another game away from home anywhere else. I'll watch cricket there for god's sake. I'll watch a Mira dart tournament.

What a place to see the Habs explode circa 2008 in the first period against league leading San Jose. Cross-ice passes, gorgeous exchanges between forwards, intuition and anticipation between the players. It was a sight to see and the Chez Serge was roaring. 

I spent the entire first intermission wondering how quickly the Sharks would tie the score. You can circa 2008 all you want, this is 2009 and these are not the same Habs. I'll give credence to that circa stuff in a month after the team will have solidified a hold on 4th place, not traded Kovalev, acquired a legitimate centre, revived Maxim Lapierre, welcomed Gui! back from Hayden diaper changing, and resurrected Carey's career. Check that last one, if Jaro plays like this throughout March, forget about seeing Price in the playoffs. This becomes Jaro's team and management suddenly has a brand new formula to chew on.

So the Habs withstand a San Jose comeback thanks to Jaro's heroics and an incredible paddle save in the third. People are all "Lets's kill the Sharks!" and stampeding down St-Laurent back to their cars. Sharks suck! Drown the Sharks ! Can you actually drown a Shark?

So I go back home with a couple of friends and we stumble across this documentary I taped a while back called Sharkwater. I'm thinking, this could be cool for a Saturday night (I'm obviously not 21 anymore)  and we start watching this movie on what I thought would be the life of sharks and migration, gestation, shark sex, premature shark ejaculation, shark orgasms, shark affairs, shark divorces, shark custody battles, shark alimony payments, you know, the usual.

But it turns out that it's this story about the vital role Sharks play in the ecosystem, and how they maintain a balance in the waters that allow for carbon dioxide to be released in the atmosphere and LET US BREATHE AIR TO STAY ALIVE. They aren't this killing machine, only 5 people succumbing to shark attacks a year. They're actually quite shy. And they're dying. Shark finning has become a multi million dollar mafia trade. 90% of the shark population has disappeared. We've all bought in to the popular depiction of the vicious shark because of glorified images and representations of what sharks are supposed to mean and do to people. When Steven Speilberg filmed Jaws, he sealed the shark's fate. He tapped into our psyches with terrifying images and unforgettable scenes of carnage. In the process, he desensitized en masse our consideration for their plight. Can you believe it? Speilberg may have started a shark holocaust.

So now I feel all guilty that we've beaten the Sharks and that I cheered for their demise. It's as if I had cheered against a team called the San Jose Ozones, or the San Jose Jews, or the San Jose Unicefs. What a dick I was.

Pray for me, for I have sinned and am wrapped in heavy shame. We are all sinners this morning Habs fans.  Shark wins are good for us all. The better the Shark fares, the easier we can breathe. Go Sharks. Go Oxygen! And Boooooo shark fin Mafia!

Pawn to Rook 4, Pawn to Rook 4! Nooooo! Why Don’t You Just Give him the King, Give it to Him! - Carey Price, 6 – Habs, 4

"He taught me the art of giving, as a boy growing up in Bangalore."

Not what you want to christen a west coast swing. In Seinfeldesque fashion, Carey Price’s performances found a way to even themselves out after a great outing against the New Jersey Lemaires and a big poo poo in San Theodore last night.

It was a frustrating game and I could have avoided the whole thing had I just listened to signs from God that found their way into my karma early on – like this one that appeared on my screen about ten minutes into the first period: Attention: Your DVR will automatically enter power-save mode in 5 minutes. Please press any remote key to continue watching TV. This of course always gets me scrambling in a mad frenzy for a lost remote that is mischievously squeezed between two couch pillows, as I anxiously wage war against a panicky countdown that begins in my head.

Mistake number one of the night was finding the zapper. I now wish I had somehow managed to mistakenly stick the remote in the fridge. I would have looked for hours, missed the game and watched Carey Clause in the highlights.

Price found a way to make Brian Campbell look like Bobby Orr and Jonathan Cheechoo like,… Jonathan Cheechoo. Pencil in the Shelley Long special he offered up on a goal from the East coast and the kid would only have needed to air-drop a few bags of rice over scattered villages in Nicaragua to win the Humanitarian of the Night Award.

TFS lost the two points, although it doesn’t help when the team gives up two quick ones when the game is barely 3 minutes old. I guess San Jose likes to skip the foreplay.

At least Montreal showed some character with their signature never say die composure. They came back to tie the game 3 times and could have made it 5 all had they pressed some more. But give credit to the Sharks; they shut Montreal down at the halfway mark of the third period and wouldn’t yield despite giving the Habs a couple of power plays and some daylight to bolster hopes of another tie. On this night, the best penalty kill in the NHL totally maimed its best power play.

Weird game, showered with odd-bounces, a bizarre cadence throughout, and some of the worst officiating of the season. The refs must have thought you only award four minute power plays to Vulcans because the red blood on the bridge of Grabovski’s nose didn't seem to impress them. Not enough to earn the right call. Then a too many Sharks, with the ice looking like the Great Barrier Reef, and yet, somehow, no call. And the one that makes me want to catapult off an Olympic diving board head first into a pile of cement, features Andrei Markov – who may not have amassed twenty words in English during his five year tenure in Montreal - called for an unsportsmanlike by the refs who must have taken offence to one of those twenty words. Unless the officials took a minor in Russian lit, this goes down as THE paradoxical call of the year. These are officials who would call travelling in a basketball game at the Special Olympics.

Yeah, just a weird vibe throughout the whole thing, with no team ever managing to set a tone or keep a lead long enough to assume any semblance of control. Broken plays followed one another in sequential disorder. A puck that gave credence to the HP sign over the front door, by morphing into a Hot Potato for three full periods.

I really hated this one, du début à la fin. It provided enough suspense to keep you interested while merely offering an unsettling Crying Game cringe on revelation of the end result. Did I really have to navigate through the broken plot for this bitter end? A game that steered itself to conclusion like the end of a John Grisham novel. Shoulda known better.

Shoulda left the remote in the fridge.

P.S: The title? An SNL sketch featuring Jim Belushi as a chess coach with a Bobby Knight temper. Best line: “Some people say I lost control that day. But when you’re down two pawns, you gotta do something.”Gold.