Marleau Bags Game Winner With Stolen HOF Stick

Pure speculation, but how else to you explain all these game-winning goals?

To borrow from an old Boston bumper sticker, “Jesus Saves, Marleau Scores on Rebounds”…or, more appropriate for last night’s game against the Minnesota Wild, “Jesus Saves, Marleau Scores on Deflections Off Guy’s Shoulders With Magic HOF Stick.”

You might assume that Patrick Marleau‘s hockey stick is just another one of the composite, super slick, cutting edge, featherlight twigs favored by most snipers these days.  You ought to know the type.  They run around $200 bucks, and are the kind you might have if you are lame enough to buy a pro stick for yourself, and hypothetically, maybe during a beer league game it gets slashed in half by some IT tool from the Sun Microsystems team, and you just wind up getting a double-minor for roughing.

Hypothetically.

In any event, if you assumed Marleau was utilizing the latest and greatest rocket science has to offer, you would be wrong.  Like Mike Modano and his Reagan Administration CCMs, Patrick Marleau has gone Old Tyme hockey and has somehow secured a vintage Northland hockey stick.

Now unlike their glitzy, modern equivalents, Marleau’s Northland weighs in excess of 10 pounds, and is essentially the equivalent of pulling one of the boards off your backyard fence and taping it up—just with a banana curve.

A student of hockey’s history will note that this exact plank was used once before, by a very famous Bostonian with a penchant for exactly what Patrick Marleau has been bringing to the table for the past month and a half—piles of game winning goals.

Twice in his career, Phil Esposito and a Northland stick registered 16 game-winning goals for the Boston Bruins, doing it in both the 1970-1971 and 1971-1972 seasons.  Patrick Marleau, on the other hand has 8 GW goals to his credit this year, but interestingly, 5 of them have come since February 5th.

That would be the date the San Jose Sharks played in Boston, and my guess as to when Patty secured Espo’s old hockey stick.

Now, the old Boston Garden is now sadly just a parking lot, and the Boston Bruins currently play in the Gahden’s successor, the luxury box laden TD Garden. Point being, Patty could have rummaged around all day in the bowels of the TD Garden pre-game and found nothing older than a pair of  Adam Oates’ gloves, a few Cam Neely teeth and maybe one of Ray Bourque’s old Alanis Morissette mix tapes.

However he did it, Patty got a hold of Espo’s relic, and I couldn’t be happier.  Let’s just hope the story stays buried in this random hockey blog, that termites don’t get to it and the game-winners keep on coming.

Although, if word of the apparent theft did get out, you can probably expect a Ben Affleck adaptation shortly thereafter. True to form, Affleck’s version would probably be an awesome flick, have lots of Irish-Americans in it, a few killer twists, a Matt Damon cameo, more Irish guys and Patrick Marleau as the head of some shadowy NHL criminal syndicate.

I would go see that movie.

And really, how could chopping my beautiful stick in half not be worth at least an instigator penalty?  I mean, I don’t have a friggin’ equipment guy, I have a local hockey store and a debit card.  And sure, I have no business with a stick meant for world class professionals, but it doesn’t mean that some engineer with a mean streak is allowed to guillotine it? Right?

They beat us too…freakin’ Sun Micro bastards.

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