Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Maybe Our Kids Will Be Able to Wear Hats without Looking Like Complete Assholes

This weekend the love of my life--and here I am referring to the hockey love of my life, Ryan Miller--was injured by some punk on the New York Rangers. God, I hate the Rangers. I hate them a lot.

The fact that Ryan Miller is injured makes me nervous. It makes a whole bunch of people nervous. And pissed. I was listening to the post-game report on Saturday night, and the announcer came unhinged. It was almost as if he'd forgotten he was hosting a radio show. He sounded more like he was sitting in his living room, a cooler of Canadian beer cracked open at his feet, and asking what the hell was wrong with the NHL these days. The Sabres, he said, were fools not to go after the kid who took Miller out behind the net. Damn fools. You weren't supposed to let anyone run at your goalie like that. Your goalie. He just didn't understand why, on the very next play, one of the boys hadn't dropped his gloves and thrown a punch to say, "You know what? You're never going to do that again, ass-head." He wanted blood.

That sounded good to me, too, and to most of the Buffalo fans who called in to tell him he was absolutely right and that the boys should've gotten busy breaking some noses, some teeth.

Still, even if Ryan Miller is injured, and even if he's out for a vague and undisclosed period of time--which gives me heart palpitations in a not-so-hot way--I was able to get some slightly nicer heart palpitations when I checked on him tonight:


Holy God. That's the best he's looked all season, and I say that fully remembering how ga-ga I went when he showed up with a snazzy new hair cut earlier this year. Now, though, it's a whole new ballgame. He's stubbled. He's winterized. He's gruff. It's a complete A+ effort.
Seeing that video gives me hope. I've discussed at length the kind of genetic soup the two of us would send on to our kids, if ever I managed to meet, charm, and snag him for my own. The horse face. The giant forehead. Ours would be some long-faced children. But here's where the hope comes in: Ryan Miller looks pretty stellar in that hat. In fact, he also looks pretty stellar in this fedora too.
Me? I have never looked good in hats. In fact, I look like an asshole in a hat--any hat that was ever made, except, maybe, for the hat Greg gave me before we left Minnesota, and that's just a miracle.
And that's something that has always made me a little sad. There are some adorable hats out there, and it would be nice to have another accessory at my disposal, but I'll never, never, never be a girl who looks good in a hat. And even if that's something I would pass on, maybe, just maybe, it could be counteracted by the gloriousness of Ryan Miller's hatted head.
So that--the issue of the hat, the possibility of little do-gooding, hockey-playing children who look adorable in any kind of headgear you could throw at them--is the only thing that's giving me a little bit of hope right now. Without that hope, I'd be spending all my free minutes thinking what I would do if I bumped into that Rangers punk in a dark alley somewhere. It would involve blood and other unpleasant things. That much I can be sure of.

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