2002-04-08 - 3:43

Eighty-five

Et le but! The Canadiens are now all but assured a playoff spot and it was great to be in the stands for the game that brought them to the brink.

The only sketchy part of the whole event was getting the tickets. Oddly enough, even though the video store down the road where I usually have my tickets printed was open today, they don't handle Ticketmaster transactions on Sundays. I'm still trying to figure that one out, since the same clerk who rents videos is the one who prints tickets and he does it at the one and only check-out desk. What is there to be closed? All that they need beyond that is a network connection; and I don't think that the Internet closes on Sundays. Curious.

As far as I could tell, the only location actually priniting tickets today was the one in Stittsville. Fortunately, Loralei was nice enough to give me a ride there. Otherwise, we would have needed to juggle the plans, since it's hard for two groups of people to meet at the arena when they don't have the tickets in advance.

As usual, I spent half of today at Greg and Kelly's, which is always fun. We popped out for supper before the game, which started the night off right--four or five people working at the restaurant tried to give me grief about my Habs jersey. It's definitely fun being a Canadiens fan in this town.

At the game, though, it was a different story, as our seats were in the middle of a vocal contingent of Montreal fans. (Oh, wait . . . "vocal Montreal fan" is redundant, isn't it?) For a change, I didn't really go out of my way to provoke the Ottawa fans by myself, since I was able to contribute to antagonizing with the group. I even skipped my usual routine, which is screaming, "Et le but!" whenever the visitors score (which applies the theory that the French will irritate people even more).

The game itself was entertaining, although it was more appealing if you can appreciate good defensive zone coverage, since it wasn't a night for non-stop scoring chances.

Montreal looked solid in the first and they outworked the Sens for the opening goal. Ottawa played their best hockey at the start of the second and they got a goal out of it. Shortly after that, though, Brisebois put it away on the power play.

I like Brisebois, although he has stretches when he gets riled up and carried away. It worked tonight, though. After he was held and roughed over in front of his own net early on one shift, he seemed to step up, leading the forecheck behind the Ottawa net and hustling back to draw the penalty that led to his power play goal.

Van Allen got the final marker, as a shot bounced off him for a flukey goal. After that, Montreal noticably held back. The gave up quite a few shots, but the few scoring chances that they allowed were turned away by Theodore. It was somewhat of a slow-paced third, with a lot of whistles; but it was fun watching the Habs clamp down.

All in all, it was a very entertaining night, especially since the Habs fans took over the arena. Hell, we even booed the "fan of the game," when they showed her on the Jumbotron. Classy. It was also fun singing the Ottawa fans to the exit ("hey, hey, goodbye"), starting when there were about four minutes left on the clock.

Now I just need to wait about a week before we start the job of sending the Bruins packing.

Other than today's fun, it was a straightforward, but enjoyable weekend. Saturday, I slept in until noon, cleaned up a little bit, and . . . hmm . . . I guess that I did rather little, come to think of it. Unless you count watching half a dozen episodes of Jackass. I'm going through them in order, and I'm into the second season, which is the one that I already watched most of. It's still funny watching them again, though, especially since I get to break them in on people who haven't seen them. Oh yeah, and I also continued a very fun argument on the message board.

All in all, that's not a bad weekend, even if I did fail to shift to an earlier schedule. I'll have to get that going soon--it's worth leaving work earlier when there's actually sunshine left in the day.

J.