Lighning Strikes... In More Ways than One:

Marc Andre Fleury made a hat-full of highlight saves, but got little offensive help after the first period in a 0-3 shutout loss Thursday in the igloo. The guys played a good game, but seemingly without the intensity of game 4. Combine that with a tit for tat(where do I get more tat?) game 4 for game 5 performance from Biron and you have a recipe for disaster... or at least a return trip to Philthydelphia. Well have to hope for better tomorrow despite the wonderful Wachovia crowd and the almost sickening Philthy-fellatio from the NBC announcers


Lightning struck the technical operations facility for FSN in Atlanta during the second period of Thursday's game knocking out the broadcast for most of the period. It was soon to be recognized as the omen it was. If that wasn't enough of a sign, Bob Error was actually witty and pertinent during the first period making a quip about the lack of a graphic that Stogie was trying to verbally cue up(THAT should have tipped us off). While scrambling madly to find a pirated VS feed online (found it!!) I was listening to the Venerable Mike Lange on the radio and I realized something. No matter how annoying Stogie and Error get, it's sooooo much better to be able to see what's going on. Mike Lange is a broadcasting God, never doubt it, but with nothing but his words to get a sense of the game there's nothing to distract you from the playoff anxiety running rampant through your body. You can't make your own calls, laugh at the screwy people in the stands, threaten a Phlyer's life for coming to close to the Flower, or scream at the refs for missing something (or calling something badly). Geno's almost-goal is a prime example. you have nothing but the descriptions of Lange (wonderful as they are) to form a picture of what happened. You can't argue that 'The Other 2-Niner' is out of his mind (no argument there) thinking that Malk kicked in the puck, or even groan about the astigmatism of the entire crew in Toronto (or fantasize about small thermo-nuclear devices dropped on Canadian cities) or even speculate about the medications they've been passing around to have screwed up the replay call so badly. In case anyone's counting (besides me) that's twice in recent memory that Atlanta has screwed up our Pens-fix in recent memory. I'm all for driving down to Georgia, finding the little man who's job it is to flip the switch to go to the back-up tower and drown him in caterpillars. In a perfect world we could listen to Mike Lange telling us to 'Go out and buy yourself a new pair of shoes' while we watched the action on the screen and Stogie could go announce baseball, or one of those other 'sports' that no one really cares about...Not sure what to do about Error, he's annoying, but has flashes of entertainment value. Maybe he and Bourque could duke it out for the Mike's side-seat in some major Pay-Per-View event.


Instead of showing some of the spectacular saves from last night's game (if there actually was a game 5) I found this nice Tower of Flower Power tribute vid, it even has the unbelievable toe save in it from several angles.... and who wouldn't want to see that again?