Due to a system crash last Friday (don't look at me, my roommate's the one that bought this silly Macintosh thing), I'm only now getting back into the swing of things. A couple of things I found in the time I spent reading through almost a week's worth of postings at once: I have to admit that I'll miss Sinhue Wallinheimo as well. Usually his kind of antics bug me, but with him they never really have. I guess goalies are different. The problem, though, is that he did not impress me at all this year. I'm not just refering to the late season tailspin. Even back in December when DU visited Mariucci and the rest of the team was playing very well, I noticed that Wally didn't frighten me at all. I'm not sure what happened to him, but he was not the same goalie this year that he was last season. On the penalty given to Jason Godbout mistakenly, I can understand the mix-up. The linesman was probably going by nothing more than the number and mistook #29 for #26. On the whole, I thought he did a fine job catching this infraction, which the refs missed. (More on this in a moment.) As to the games this past weekend, I thought Minnesota looked much better on Saturday than they had recently (I didn't get to see the Friday game; our TV blew a tube sometime that afternoon before the VCR turned on. Not a good day for 20th century technology in our household.) Most of the problems I've complained about were addressed and a solid game was played by almost all. Before I get too excited about it, though, I want to see if they can do it outside of Mariucci and against an opponent that has won a game outside of Alaska this year. The big part of Saturday's game was the disgraceful show put on by the Seawolves. It wasn't just the 3rd period when the game was out of hand, either. Very early, Darren Bradley was given 2 minutes for roughing when he had delivered two solid punches to the head. A brawl a little later in the period started when an Anchorage player checked Andy Brink into the boards a good second and a half after the whistle. (UAA wound up with the power play, too, though that was for a Nick Checco slash before the whistle.) The Seawolves took nearly every opportunity to run Gophers from behind into the borads until they finally got called for it late in the third period. The spearing call on Dan Hendrickson was absolutely deserved and a fine piece of work by the linesman (except for the numeral inversion). However... the two players were locked up and jawing well before the puck dropped on the face-off. The infraction would never have happened if the refs would have taken charge. Which pretty much sums up the whole night's action. Anchorage convinced me that they are clearly the worst band of goons in the league. Much the same set of events happened on our trip up there: a close, hard-fought game on Friday night followed by a Saturday game in which UAA is only interested in fighting hard. After all the accolades given to Brush Christiansen in the last week, this was a shameful performance to highlight his ride into the sunset. J. Michael Jackson HOCKEY-L is for discussion of college ice hockey; send information to [log in to unmask], The College Hockey Information List.