NHL/NBA Playoff Diary Vol. 1: Oh, Darling!

What is this, and why should you care?

I don't know, and I don't know.

It's something I'll do once or 32 times. And that is all the people need to know.

It strikes me as funny and odd that the National Hockey League and National Basketball Association postseasons drag on over two months, twice as long as the National Football League playoffs and World Cup, which have considerably more followers.

Hockey and basketball, two winter sports, don't start deciding their most-prestigious trophies until we're almost a month into spring. You know if you're too interested in sports if you're following these playoffs on a warm Sunday afternoon instead of, you know, doing something.

Anyway, last night I watched the overtimes of the Chicago Blackhawks-Nashville Predators NHL game. There were two of them. I always hope for 10.

I want the Stanley Cup playoff games to end up resembling a 1969 movie with Jane Fonda called 'They Shoot Horses, Don't They?” It's about a collection of down-and-out people during the Depression who are trying to win a grueling dance marathon for a prize of $1,500. And the food is free.

It covers 879 hours. The marathon, not the movie itself. It is dark. It leaves behind a trail of human wreckage, and no one has a satisfying ending.

Here's a 3-minute trailer for the movie. Spoiler alert: It won't put a spring in your step.

Now, I don't want the human carnage. I just want to see players barely able to skate a shift or lift their sticks, goalies crumpled to the ice who can only hope pucks don't come their way. But the games almost always are done before a fourth overtime. Maybe someday.

The Blackhawks won largely because they benched ace goalie Corey Crawford in the first period after he gave up three goals and replaced him with someone named Scott Darling, who stopped all 42 shots he faced.

Darling has been a pro since 2010, but didn't get to the NHL until this season. He has played for the Louisiana Ice Gators, the Florida Everblades, the Wheeling Nailers, the Wilkes-Barre Penguins, the Hamilton Bulldogs, the Milwaukee Admirals, and was with the Rockford IceHogs as recently as February.

Yes, there was a team called the Florida Everblades. There still is.

This guy Darling, he's had problems with drinking and social anxiety. Now he's a stone wall in the Stanley Cup playoffs.

There is always one of these guys, a goalie who suddenly becomes impenetrable in the postseason. He usually wasn't a Rockford IceHog two months earlier.

But more interesting than that is, yeah, Nashville has an NHL team. There used to be just six teams in the league, the Original Six. None were below the Mason-Dixon Line.

It would have been a good laugh to attend a Blackhawks game 50 years ago and tell the fan next to you, 'Just wait until Nashville has an NHL team and plays the Hawks in the playoffs on something called cable television. That'll be something to see.”

What would have been just as good for a laugh is to have gone to Nashville 50 years ago and declare 'There will be hockey here one day, my friends! And it will be the best hockey league in the world. And our team will be called ... the Predators!”

It wouldn't have been as good for a laugh when you found yourself taken to a Nashville institution that treated mental illness.

Fifty years actually goes by in a flash if you are free to go where you want.

There were three other NHL playoff games last night and four more tonight (Thursday) and four more Friday, and on Saturday the NBA playoffs start, and it goes until mid-June, and ... they shoot horses, don't they?

That's all for now.