The Severed Cortex

Link: http://blues.nhl.com/team/app?gameNumber=1176&gameType=2&page=Recap&season=20072008&service=page

I wasn't necessarily looking to go to another hockey game with Robert, but he seemed to like the last game so much. And since we got the tickets for free from one of Nancy's coworkers it seemed like a good idea. I knew once the Cardinal season started that hockey would be the last thing on a St. Louis sports fan's mind so I figured there'd be plenty of hockey opportunities in April and May. Plenty of opportunities for free tickets and plenty of opportunities for the Blues to announce a crowd of 13,500+, 1/2 of which are cleverly disguised as empty seats. Under normal circumstances I would have passed on the tickets, free or not, but these were for the last game with the Blackhawks so it seemed like a good idea.

I don't keep up with hockey anymore but there are a couple of people at work who do. The Friday before the game one of those Blues fans said there had been a lot of hype written in the paper and the likelihood of a brawl breaking out was a real possibility. Great. We didn't talk about fighting before the last game and that's the one thing that stood out for Robert; the fight. Now we're talking about a full on melee occurring. So, on the way to meeting Nancy at the Union Station Hard Rock we talk about the possibility of a fight. His response: The goalies don't fight do they?. No, not usually.

The wait at Hard Rock was over an hour.
The wait at Landry's was a more reasonable 35 minutes. I'm not a great big Landry's fan. I think they're overpriced for what you get, but I guess the same could be said for Hard Rock. Robert enjoyed looking at the lobsters with Nancy and later he enjoyed his shrimp. I ate crawdad tails, which were tasty, but not anywhere near the real thing. Nothing beats sitting at Fitzgerald's on Lake Pontchartrain eating Mississippi mud bugs served on a battered looking cookie sheet while washing them down with bottle after bottle of warm Dixie. Of course, you can't do that anymore. I digress. We finished eating just as the game was starting but with the short walk to Savvis/Kiel we managed to show up only 5 minutes into the 1st period. Apparently there was already a fracas before we found our seats, which while free (I'm not bitching), were somewhere close to Bob Uecker. You can see the action fairly well, but man it's waaaaaaay up there.

The Blues skated like wombats and were often pushed around by the Blackhawks. Sometimes it was just embarrassing to watch how much more physical Chicago was. In essence they are the same basic, crappy team as the Blues, but they sure looked like a real team when placed against the Blues. With the score 4 - 0 in favor of the Blackhawks and only 6 minutes left in the game, we decided to head out and beat the traffic. By the time we walked to the truck and headed out of the Union Station parking lot, the Blues tightened up the score 4 -3. We flipped on the radio to hear that time had expired.

Robert said the tickets we had the last time were better. I agree. And then he fell asleep on the way home.