Dear Mother Nature,
We’ve never spoken and I doubt you know who I am, but I felt it was necessary to reach out and contact you on behalf of hockey fans across North America and around the world. We have a small little game scheduled for New Year’s Day—and the powers-that-be were presumptuous enough to schedule the game outside without consulting you. That was wrong. We apologize. But that doesn’t change the fact that we have 65,000 people ready to attend the game at Heinz Field (many of whom are traveling into the Iron City solely for this purpose). We have the attention of a major network for the only time this year. We even have HBO doing a month-long pre-game show complete with portly, foul-mouthed coaches and villains who cut the skate laces of opponents. We might not have that many eggs, but they’re all in one proverbial basket.
We understand that from time to time you must make your power and wrath known (By the way, thanks for the little earthquake this morning, that was nice). All people are at your mercy. When you see something like an indoor hockey league have the audacity to play an outdoor game in January, we understand that you want to remind everyone that it’s your world and we’re just living in it.
We’ve already talked to Father Time and he seems cool with lending some older players to lace ‘em up for one last time in the spotlight. Per an agreement with him to avoid any broken hips, the game will not be seen by anyone outside of the actual stadium. He DID say, however, that it would be in our best interest to contact you because you can be extremely vindictive and your wrath is furious.
So here we are, pleading for a certain type of weather. Snow would be great. We know you dropped a bunch of the white stuff on the Northeast over the last few days, so we trust you could save some of that for Pittsburgh. Despite Patrik Elias and Travis Zajac cursing you over the last 48 hours, they are not representative of the rest of hockey fans. Snow is fine. Snow is good. It’s rain that is bad.
In fact, feel free to dump as much rain on Buffalo as you’d like. Their games are indoors and apparently no one goes out after 6pm anyway.
There are a few things that we can promise if you help us out here. Since it’s football season and you insist on giving us football weather, we should start there. We promise that if you avoid the rain on January 1, we will all do our best to stand between Ben Roethlisberger and any woman he may find in a club. For that matter, we promise to stand between the Washington Redskins and any football fields.
When people talk about Alexander Ovechkin and Barack Obama being the most powerful men in the most powerful city in the country, we’ll remind everyone that it’s Mother Nature who is more powerful than both.
Finally, when people say that Sidney Crosby and Alexander Ovechkin are “forces of nature,” they’re speaking metaphorically. No one really thinks they’re a force of nature. That’s you. Please don’t be offended. We promise to straighten people out each time they use the term incorrectly.
We hope these few tokens will be enough to avoid any catastrophic rain even to start the New Year. We have a lot riding on this game. There’s the promise of a new TV deal out there that our vertically challenged, fearless leader promises to bring us great riches. Have you seen some of our teams? We don’t need great riches—we need enough money to survive. Well, that and a TV contract that promises to never cut away from a playoff game early for a horse race. Postponing a game our Napoleon has been relentlessly promoting could be devastating.
Remember, if you screw this up for us—you could be stuck with the NBA being popular for the next 20 years. And no one wants that.
Do the right thing.
Sincerely,
NHL Fans Everywhere
Matt Reitz is the Editor-In-Chief here at ViewFromMySeats.com and former NHL Writer for ProHockeyTalk on NBCSports. When he’s not shoving a mic in the face of NHLers or explaining why home teams should wear white, he’s usually trying to figure out what song to play next on his iPod. It’s a never-ending job.
