If A Slump Falls In The Floridas, And Nobody Sees It, Do We Still Get The Points?

There are two things you can count on during the Senators' annual early season two-game swing through the Sunshine State. The first being the Emperor's Luncheon, in which Eugene The Fantastically Magnificent descends from on high and deigns to host a team meal at whatever giant mansion happened to catch his fancy that week (funny how the team always seems to win the game immediately before this little bread breaking, no?).

The second? I will never actually see the games. It always screws with my mojo. Just like the players, we basement dwelling blogging types need a few games to get properly acclimatized to the ebb and flow of the regular season, if for no other reason than to properly adjust our undergarments and convince mom to bake another plate of cookies. So when that two game vaccuum comes around every October, I always find myself blinking in a bewildered fashion and scrambling to throw something, anything up in this space just to reassure myself that I am still, in fact, capable of forming a coherent sentence. Not only that, but it forces me to come up with something original.

And as you can plainly see...I hate that.

Oh yeah, almost forgot...we lost the game in a shootout.

Up Next:

Well, it was fun while it lasted. Alex Ovechkin and his Sens-killing cohorts roll into the Bank on Tuesday night. You remember them, right? On the upside, I'm told someone has invented a device capable of carrying images of live sporting events through space using nothing but vaccuum tubes and rubber bands so that we may enjoy these events in the comfort of our own homes. My stars, what an age we live in! (7:30 p.m., SportsNet East).

Behind Enemy Lines:

If it's the first Capitals game of the year, it has to be one of the Founding Fathers of the hockey blogosphere, Japer's Rink (seriously, when JP first appeared on the Tubes, I was still looking for the "any" key). And I couldn't be prouder (stupid internal grammar Nazi) more proud than to number among the 1,677 sites listed in the blogroll.