But it got started soon enough, and in a nicely zippy fashion, and I realized that hockey suffers on television much the same way baseball does; the television screen just doesn't let you see the whole ``strategic unit'' of stuff that's happening at once, and you can't get the full sense of the game when it's chopped into master shots and close-ups instead.

I definitely feel that way about televised baseball. It only seems to have gotten worse as they've added more cameras. Now it's just closeup after closeup. I almost feel like I'm better off listening on the radio, where at least the announcer might tell me what the outfield is doing.

I went to my first hockey game a couple months ago, as it happens. (How MTU let me graduate without going to one, I have no idea; I must have slipped through.) It was a lot of fun and I'd do it again, even though our local team seems to be pretty awful.