Caps Re-Cap (4-1 W vs. Toronto) | Thoughts From the End of the Bar

The Caps won, they got two points, Ovechkin scored twice, Laich scored twice, Theodore got the win.

OK, enough about that.

I want to tell you my story from Sunday.

As you probably know, the Capitals retired Mike Gartner's #11 last night. It was a nice ceremony, though it maybe lacked a little of the pomp and circumstance that you'd see in other more traditional hockey cities. And it would have been better to have more of the players on the ice with him - even they don't have their numbers retired. Scott Stevens was in the building for crying out loud, let him come down to the ice.

I am a season ticket holder, so you can imagine how much I enjoyed being there and taking in the ceremony and cheering on one of my childhood heroes growing up as a Caps fan for the last 25 years.

Yeah, no.

I was in New Jersey this weekend, visiting my girlfriend. I left early Sunday afternoon, leaving 5 hours to get to the arena (a 180-mile trip, mind you) and be there for the ceremony. That all went to hell in a handbasket thanks to traffic on the NJ Turnpike between Exits 8A and 7, and then traffic in Delaware (why are we using that state again?) that lasted 9 miles to the Delaware Turnpike tolls, where you pay $4 for the privilege of driving less than 15 miles through the state - a drive which, yesterday, took 1 hour, 5 minutes.

It also didn't help that even when the road was more open, morons in all sorts of cars from all sorts of states almost seemed like they were trying to keep me from getting there on time. Once in Maryland, an **** from South Carolina in a white van cut me off five times as I tried to change lanes to get around him, then tailgated me for about an hour. If I hadn't been trying to get somewhere, I would have let him hit me, beat him up, and gotten the insurance money crazy fast.

Instead, I got to the exit at Catonsville and decided it wasn't going to happen, so I rushed home and watched it on TV.

The moral of the story here is that people are **** stupid. You can't overestimate the efforts they will make to screw up your plans and your life.

I will get them all back somehow. Hopefully they were all Maple Leafs fans and the revenge was the 4-1 beatdown the Capitals delivered when the game commenced. Or maybe they were Rangers fans still pissed about blowing that 4-0 lead last week. Or maybe they were Lightning fans who just ... hey, they're Lightning fans. What else do they have to do but screw with people on the highway?

Many tough games coming up for the Caps, beginning Tuesday night in Buffalo, then home games with those Lightning (OK, maybe they don't belong in this list), then the Flyers and Rangers. Hard to imagine they will still only have 1 regulation home loss after that, but hopefully they get healthier in the interim and play some good hockey.

I mean, on the bright side - I missed the ceremony, but I'm not a Lions fan.