Last night I had a dream. I don't mean it in the same philosophical sense that Martin Luther King Jr. did, but I genuinely had a dream.
Following my typing of the Penguins victory of Tampa, I proceeded to play a few games of NHL 08. I played three games against three different people and all three of them chose Philly. I opted for St. Louis and Phoenix twice.
I suppose all of this hockey embedded itself into my cerebrum (tiny as it may be) prior to my retiring for the night around 4am.
It wasn't long before I dreamed of being at center ice in Mellon Arena. Marian Hossa showed up to practice without sticks or a puck, which is of course entirely logical for a hockey player to do. So I had to drive to his house in downtown Philly (I assume this came from NHL 08). When I opened up his garage via a security code he gave me, there were endless rows of sticks hanging up across bars on his workroom wall. Name brands too. Apparently even my dreams have the tendency of being sponsored - Sherwood, Koho and for some reason Easton (a baseball bat company for those who don't know AND a city in PA). His hockey pucks were (obviously) organized and stacked in tomato boxes throughout the garage.
It wasn't long before I packed up my car and shot off to Pittsburgh which, amazingly,was only 20 minutes from downtown Philly.
I got there just in time for the game. In praise of my efforts, I was awarded a spot on the fourth line. But even my dreams have hints of reality in them, as my attempts to break up a play in the dying minutes of the third resulted in my giving up the game-winning goal.
I didn't have a postgame press conference in my dream, but funny enough a Pittsburgh paper (no specific name) read the headline: "Therrien forgives but won't forget."
The drop-quote in the article read - "He tried his best out there and that's all we can ask."
Then I woke up.