I don't know if I can handle an entire season of this. Every sport needs drama, but if I didn't know any better, I'd think this team was working off a script every night.

ACT I.
People lose consciousness.

It starts disastrously, and the first twelve minutes are gone, vanished, just like that. Twelve minutes of weak passes, lost pucks, and hazy vision. There is an imagined time-out. The goalies switch places as if sleepwalking. One's impression of the scene should be veiled; all the chaos is occurring backstage, in the dark.

****

ACT II.
They see the future (or do they?)

The curtain is raised! The game slips back into focus! Carnage everywhere. Not smoke and fire, but alarming numbers on the scoreboard, and all the jagged marks on the ice, evidence of the terrible events that have occurred -- they must have occurred -- but no one knows what exactly happened, or why, or how anyone will recover. Amid the public confusion and outcry, a collective glimmer on the players' bench: knowledge, dredged up from the marrow, that it's not the end of the world. There are forty-seven minutes left in the game. The show has barely begun. The people will get their money's worth. [The veteran JOHN MADDEN scores a goal. A low hum of approval, but no one seems impressed yet.]

****
ACT III.
The rest of the drama is a muddled confection of philosophy, augury, and science fiction.

Some will question the nature of the game, or their own place in the world, or the validity of human determinism. Some won't. TROY BROUWER sacrifices his body without giving it a second thought. A salvation party is formed by youngsters PATRICK KANE, DAVE BOLLAND, and DUSTIN BYFUGLIEN, who know not the underlying mechanisms of time and space, but carry out their self-selected mission believing that the answers will lie at the end. The denouement is executed to perfection by PATRICK SHARP, in a crowd-pleasing turn of events.

****
ACT IV. A single moment that hardly comprises a whole scene.

A spotlight. BRENT SEABROOK enters from stage left. He stands in silent contemplation for twenty-three (23) seconds, then delivers a three-second monologue. The curtain falls to rapturous applause.

(This game was shat out right in front of my eyes. I saw it, all of it, from Section 314, with my fingers in my mouth and my knees wired to bolt. And despite the video highlights, the pictures, the stat sheet, the stories rolling in just under the midnight deadline, I'm still having trouble believing it actually happened. I guess this is what they call a living myth.)