Tonight (after watching Tiger tie it up), it took us an hour to crawl from the Garden State Parkway to the Tappan Zee Bridge. It seemed that a lot of the reason had revealed itself with a sign on the left side of the road: “left two lanes closed ahead.” So naturally, cars in the left two lanes began careening toward the right two lanes. They slowed, they blocked traffic, they left the far-left lane totally vacant for about a tenth of a mile as they moved over. They created chaos.
Now, there’s irrationality in there because we really learned how to handle that by Kindergarten: Go to the merge, then take turns, the way Pennsylvania makes explicit. But what was really irrational was the good ol’ Pavlov’s Dog reason: They merged only because the sign told them to. There were no lanes actually closed.
That’s, in a way, how I feel about the NHL Entry Draft, which is coming up Friday and Saturday. We get ourselves worked into a lather, wondering about what our teams plan to do, rating 18-year-old kids on their skill and speed and intelligence and intangibles, and we game out what the teams’ front offices might be thinking. We know these teams are going to have their farm systems replenished with these fantastic kids we’ve been reading about and watching, and we’re sure the top two or three (or more) are going to be contributors for the big club very, very soon.
Some years, they ring the bell, and we get dinner (eventually). Some years, they post the signs, and we get no lane closures. But most of the time — unless you’ve got a Trader Mike Milbury on hand to stir the pot — we don’t know which one it was until three or four years later.
So the older I get, the less I get myself worked up about the draft. Still, it has its moments, it’s a necessary evil, and there’s always that “eventually” possibility. We’ll keep an eye on the leadup, and there’s some fun stuff we might throw in here this week.
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BBC2 has been focusing on Liverpool documentaries for the last little while. Check out these two, if you’ve got a spare hour or two. Try not to get a lump in the throat during the second one.
Greg Prince notes that today (Sunday) is the 20th anniversary of Bull Durham‘s release. I was joking about that one in the press box Friday at the Brakettes, when they were only up 1-0 in the sixth and the high school kids were threatening. “You can still turn the sprinklers on,” I mumbled…
And finally, missed it earlier this week: RIP, Eliot Asinof.