Running for Your Life: Penguins in Anticlimax

So, you want to live in Park Slope Dept.

Overheard, a woman in a complaining tone, remarks to her friend while on a stroll in Prospect Park:

“I know tons of mothers. I have loads of them in my phone … ”

They’re back, these Penguins. Fresh off a 7-0 drubbing Sunday (May 21) of the Ottawa Senators, my homeland’s last remaining Stanley Cup hopeful in this year’s playoffs. The Sens are not out of it by any means, but they’ve got to find a way to beat a very determined foe, these Penguins.

Due to a quirk in the way the playoffs are run, the Penguins played and defeated the clear favorites to win the Cup this year: the Washington Capitals. Reasonable sports watchers will tell you the de facto Cup Final this year was that Pens-Caps series. Of course, in sports, any team can upset another. It’s just comes down to the better team needs to play in such a way that it beats itself for that to happen.

(Oh and ’nuff said about front-running. Been cheering for these Pens since they came into the league; still wince when I think of Eddie Westfall’s lone goal in the 1975 series in which the Islanders stormed back, winning four straight, and in Pittsburgh on that fateful Game 7, to defeat the Penguins, who’d been up 3-0 in games, and knock them out of the Cup semis. There would be 16 lean years before they would redeem themselves and win their first Cup, in Spring 1991.)

Fact is, I miss the Pens-Caps series. Each year, it seems, since the Penguin Cup runs of the early 1990s, they’ve been exciting and dynamic and, well, ninety percent of the time the Pens come out on top.

So let the Cup games continue. Me, I’ll be watching and following – but hankering for the next Pens-Caps tilt …

Next: Running for Your Life: The Write Stuff – Letters, That Is

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