A good game is a good game

Friday 2/20/26

Returned to the Bunker Hill Monument Wednesday to run stairs. Can't say it was a thing of workout beauty, but I did okay. Ran five circuits of stairs just under a half hour. That's what the pace should be just about even if without time away. It was a little harder, though. Walked three miles and did 100 push-ups, too. Repeated all of this yesterday. Was slower in the Monument, but that was fine. Just trying to get the leg muscles up to speed. You have two main parts: legs and lungs. I went from not running many stairs for several weeks to six days in a row of pretty intensive stairs (24,000 total). It's okay/smart to have a day mostly for the legs as you're ramping up again.

I've been seeing videos of people doing push-ups. They post them saying in effect, "Look at me go," but they do them wrong. Try doing them right. And go all the way down. Lot harder.

I monitored the score of the Czechia-Canada game while in the Monument on Wednesday. Czechia had them. Kind of a soft goal, too, on the OT game winner. But Canada found a way.

This is Macklin Celebrini's age nineteen season. A breakout season, obviously, and the Olympics have been a breakout moment in that breakout season. If anything, he's even more dominant than he was in Hockey East a couple years ago and I better understand his Hobey Baker victory now. He looks to me like a player who has a Hart trophy in his future and that future may not be very far off. He's explosive.

The people expressing surprise as to the instant chemistry between McDavid and Celebrini don't understand hockey. Players can learn each other's ways over time. Sometimes it's very clear when guys have played together for a while. But other times, two guys can be thrown out there on the same line and they just click. They can think how the other is thinking or going to think, even if they have different individual play styles. It's like connection, but the sports version. You know how you meet someone and you have that instant or near-instant connection? Same idea.

Then the US survived Sweden. I thought that was going to be a hard test for them going in and could very well have resulted in a loss. Sweden tied it late--even later than Canada tied up their game--and then the U.S.'s best player in Quinn Hughes won it in OT. I'm glad when these things don't go to penalty shots, which is a ridiculous way to settle anything that's not a regular season affair.

Both Canada and the US should win their games today. Canada has the harder match-up I'd say. But barring a pretty big surprise, they're on schedule to play each other in the gold medal game on Sunday and that should be some dynamite hockey.

This Canada team may be one of the best teams of all-time. A top five all-time team. Top three. Top two. The US can beat them if the stars are stars, they get clutch goaltending, they're physical, even rough. I'd give them like a thirty-five to forty percent chance. Sidney Crosby left the Czechia game with an injury, and I believe his status has yet to be determined, but I also wasn't paying much attention after yesterday morning.

Watched the last period and then overtime of the US-Canada women's gold medal game yesterday afternoon. After dominating everyone they had played up until this match, including Canada, the US trailed 1-0 before tying it up with a couple minutes to go, then BC alum Megan Keller won it in the extra session.

I thought it was very exciting. I am a longtime watcher of women's ice hockey, which I wrote about in an LA Times op-ed. After the game I was reading through a couple discussions on Reddit, and the comments were cruel. One person after another saying how bad these women are at hockey, that they're at the level, at best, of sixteen-year-old boy juniors, that the game was slow, the players looked clueless and amateur, the play was sloppy.

I didn't think any of these things. And comparing women's hockey players to male hockey players is besides the point. It's like comparing a baseball player in 1930 to a player now. You have to look at players relative to their peers.

Few understand this. Yes, you can compare Rogers Hornsby to Aaron Judge, but you imagine them on this neutral field where they have the same advantages, same disadvantages. (Hornsby was better, by the way, and it doesn't matter that if you took 1922 Hornsby exactly as he was, at that size, with that training, and what he was used to seeing from pitchers, and dropped him on a 2026 Opening Day roster that he'd have a tough go of it; that's not what we're measuring.)

I would say that the comments bordered on the hateful. Some had a misogynistic underpinning, but it wasn't just that. I know these people don't know hockey, too. Few people know hockey. Hardly anyone who didn't play hockey knows hockey.

This wasn't what people were seeing, but rather what they wanted to say in the moments after a great game, really to pump themselves up. Such a strange way to go about that. Putting others down to elevate one's self. It's nonsensical, because how would that elevate you? I guess in this case because it's someone trying to pass themselves off as an expert. But yeah, these people don't know hockey at all.

And you know what? A good game is a good game. A competitive, hard fought game, with stakes is the stuff. I was nervous! And I didn't have a horse in the race.

I saw a post from a dumb Canadian saying that the Canadian team was superior.

I saw a post from a dumb American saying that that Canadian women should have smiled more as their silver medals were being placed around their necks.

People are drunken, babbling fucking idiots, with or without the alcohol. And of course the American woman was as big as a box car. They just say one moronic thing after another. Words are like liquid shit out of their mouths and they don't stop blasting it. I honestly don't know how a species can be this stupid, almost across the board, when it doesn't have to be. It's like the vast majority of the species performs way, way, way below what is scientifically the species' natural intelligence level that comes with being born as a member of that species. It's like if all the beavers stopped cutting down trees with their teeth and instead just stood in the middle of the road for as long as it took to be run over. Our brains don't work. We've made them so they don't work at all.

Then you'll have the guy going for points on the internet who posts some screed about sexism and how wrong it is that the women aren't payed like the men. People really don't get economics. I've been to a lot of high-level women's hockey games, and unless it's something like the Olympics, there simply aren't many people there. It's like family and close friends. That guy has gone social media whoring, of course, because what he really wants to do is have a woman let him roll his nasty ass body on top of her, but he's also not smart enough to understand the difference between profit and subsidization. What can you understand when that's who you are? Only things like dark and light, warm and cold, painful and not painful.

Keller, a defenseman, used to take a lot of maddening, unnecessary penalties at BC. She'd be deep in the offensive zone and throw an opponent to the ice. I guess you could call her physical in a sport where you're not allowed to be. Her temper and size would sometimes get the better of her (and her team). But the move she made on that defender was beautiful, and not what you'd expect from a defenseman. That was a masterful goal. And for the gold. The last time the US women won Olympic gold it was on penalty shots. This was a way better way to get to do it.