After a bit of a long day, I got home and decided to curl up with a little reading.  I don’t seem to take the opportunity enough, to just leave the computer behind, and just read.

Which led me to not thinking about the post I had to write when I got home, which put me in a time crunch.  50 minutes to put up today’s post, to do what I promised I would.

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I keep thinking about Paul Kariya.  When he and Teemu Selanne joined the Colorado Avalanche for a single season, there was promise.  This was still the Avalanche of old, with Forsebrg and Foote and Blake and Sakic.  This was right before the lockout, and even though Patrick Roy had left, and Tony Granato was starting his first failed stint as head coach, there was plenty of reasons to be excited.  It was the tandem that had wowed them in Anaheim before, together again.  And with a team to play with.  Just look at that roster. That’s a hell of a team, and you won’t find one like it any time soon.

Kariya, of course, was coming off the cinderella playoff run of 2003.  And we all remember what happened for Paul Kayira in the finals.

Heroics?  It’s hard, at times, to treat something that happens in a hockey game as heroics.  He certainly did the unthinkable.

It turns out, that the real cinderella was JS Giguere, who came back to win the Cup in 2007.  For Paul Kariya, his stint with the Avs the next season was hampered by injuries, and he was never the same player after 2003.  He did fairly well with the Nashville Predators, but wasn’t the difference maker he was with the Mighty Ducks.  Selanne, on the other hand, had much needed knee surgery, and has been unstoppable ever since.

I think about that clip, and that hit, which would be an illegal hit today, and I know that people want the heroics, the unthinkable, the guy who gets up off the ice and shows the crowd, the other team, the world what he is made of.  We want those stories, but what has to happen first, what makes the player get up off the ice, it isn’t sustainable.  It isn’t enough.  It isn’t worth it.

They have changed the “head-shot rule” to get as close to banning head hits as they can, without explicitly getting rid of them.  They are getting closer to getting rid of these stories, and I say good riddance.  There are other stories out there, waiting to be written.  How many more careers cut short do we need, all so someone doesn’t spend two minutes in the box?  For maybe two points in the standings?

Wouldn’t it be nice to see Paul Kariya like he could have been post lockout, instead of someone who just couldn’t find their place on a team, who couldn’t be the player they were.  That’s the tragedy here.  I loved seeing Paul Kariya get up off the ice, to come back and score that goal. We try to immortalize that moment, because that’s all we know how to do.  But it couldn’t last forever.

Nothing ever does.