A disagreement, of sorts

What. The. Fuck.

In deference to last night’s Ranger-Sabres game, I’m not even going to dignify the bullshit second goal call with any sort of pithy, urbane phrasing. I’m not going to dredge up the phrase “in the crease”, I’m not going to blabber about conspiracies or reverse conspiracies like a whiny little Beech (C, WSH) (Come on people, I’m hurting). I’m just going to state it, plainly and simply:

That was a goal.

Or, if you want to be grammatically incorrect about it, as most Rangers fans do:

That was not not a goal.

I knew it. Lundqvist knew it. The commentators knew it. The refs knew it. The only one who didn’t immediately know it was Daniel Briere himself, and that’s only because he’d been summarily ground facefirst into the ice by a Rangers caveman after making the shot. As soon as they showed the video, mankind knew it. And yet, somehow, no goal.

Who was running the replay room? Brett Hull? There’s not a doubt in my mind that if this had gone down on Buffalo territory, there would have been justice. I was too busy lipreading Lindy Ruff following the call (my skills are a tad rusty - who is this Buck character he kept referring to?), but I suspect if they’d miked up any one of the Rangers fans near the replay booth during that interminable call to Toronto, the words “stab” and “kick your ass as you walk to your car on 36th street” would have made more than a cameo appearance. There’s home ice advantage, then there’s home threat advantage.

The real question here is, how can we be relying on one, grainy 30f/s camera angle to decide the playoff fate of a team? There’s higher quality security footage for the cash register at the nacho stand. Why was it possible for me to get biblically intimate with Brendan Shanahan’s missing incisor not five minutes before, yet no one was able to train more than one camera on the actual goal itself? Why can I count every last ginger hair in that sorry thing that Marek Malik is calling a playoff beard, yet the goal footage looks like claymation? This is Madison Square Garden, and the best we can get is one overhead shot, deemed inconclusive because the goalie’s glove got in the way? Did the Versus best boy or key grip not account for the fact that some portion of the goal space would, at some point, be occupied by actual goalie? Why not just cut the one camera out altogether, and we can just sit around the transistor radio and listen to Brian Engblom tell us what happened?

Whatever. I’m over it. More hockey for me. And Jagr, I’d start doubling up on the padding, if I were you. Lindy Ruff didn’t look like he was interested in settling things amicably.