"Well, At Least We Got a Point": The Wild in 2013

This is Part 2 of a 7-part look-back at what happened in Minnesota sports over the past 12 months. Some of these stories are obviously figments of my imagination. A couple actually happened. These are the tales, imageries, conversations, and visualizations that best described, at least for me, what it meant to be a Minnesota sports fan over the past 12 months.

Cal Clutterbuck, commencing his traditional post-goal rendition of "The Circle of Life." Courtesy of the AP.

The game proceeded as most other high-stakes contests had during the time I had known these guys. Tense stretches of rising action followed by Vesuvius bursts of unfettered emotion: directed at refs, at the personal shortcomings of opposing players, at the heroics of Josh Harding, the Wild’s emergency man-between-the-pipes.

A first period Cal Clutterbuck tally sent us into raptures, but an absolute snipe by Marian Hossa late in the second equalized for the host Blackhawks. The shots piled up for Chicago, but Josh Harding went low, went high, and stayed in front of everything the world-class opposition could throw at him. The game trickled into overtime, and star Zach Parise had a clear shot from in front that goalie Corey Crawford kicked just wide.

Don't Buy a House: Catching Up with Minnesota Sports in 2,100 Words or Less

First rule of buying a house: Don't buy this tiny of a house.

On May 30th, my girlfriend and I closed on a house just east of the Minnesota State Fairgrounds. This was the culmination of a whirlwind month-long search to find a place we could afford in a nice neighborhood relatively close to where we worked. A couple dozen showings and open houses into our search, we found what would become our new house on the last day before we would have to switch our focus to rentals. It's a charming 3-bedroom with room for renovation in the finished upstairs and enough work done in the "unfinished" basement to host Vikings games and (heaven forbid) the occasional Minnesota playoff contest.

You Down With PSP?: Firing Up the Postseason Success Predictor 8680

It’s now been about a year since the launch of Minnesota Sports Emporium. We will have a full Fiscal Year Recap in the next, oh I dunno, month or so (Who are you, our investors?? Hold your horses.) for as our winter extends into probably mid-April, so too does our collective writing hibernation instinct. If we posted articles at a more glacial pace than we already do, we’d probably have broken off the Arctic Ice Sheet, drifted southward and melted already (TERRIBLE GLOBAL WARMING PUN: PRE-EMPTIVE APOLOGY)!

This Was Supposed To Be The Winter of Sports!: or, Fun With Limericks

The world's first book o' limericks, penned by Edward Lear

(The following is a combination of truths and fictions relating to the origin of the limerick—a rhythmic, five-line poem structure—and the current states of affair for our local sports teams. Please consider all of the following limerick-related information in the same manner as you would any recent victory from any of our local squads: with a grain of salt and a swift retaliatory kick in the nether regions.)

Regression to the Lean: Reviewing a 96-Hour Pu Pu Platter

Tuesday, January 22
Nashville 3, Wild 1

Wednesday, January 23
Northwestern 55, Golden Gophers 48
Brooklyn 91, Timberwolves 83

Thursday, January 24
A Brief Respite

Friday, January 25
Detroit 5, Wild 3
Washington 114, Timberwolves 101

Saturday, January 26
Wisconsin 46, Golden Gophers 45
Charlotte 102, Timberwolves 101

As much as it sometimes seems like I revel in our sporting misery, I really don't like writing articles like this very much. They're much more cathartic than enjoyable, and there's no sense of a weight being lifted when the last keystroke has been hit and the last picture placed. But this was one remarkably awful week of sports for all of our most nationally relevant hometown teams, and a website that cites taking mediocrity to task as one of its stated motives for existence must give some kind of comment about the line of turds the Timberwolves, Wild, and Gophers guys basketball team have laid in one particularly trying 96-hour span.

Game of Groans: The Week in Review

Tough week for sports fans in Minnesota (or as I call it, Wester-gross). Here’s a brief summary:

The Fiscal Year of Our Discontent: Article 1

Combined Win-Loss Records, March 31, 2011-March 29, 2012

Minnesota Gophers (BKB) 23-14 (.590)

Minnesota Gophers (FB) 3-9 (.250)

Minnesota Timberwolves 25-35 (.417)

Minnesota Twins 63-99 (.389)

Minnesota Vikings 3-13 (.188)

Minnesota Wild 34-38-10 (.415)

Combined: 151-218 (.409)

FY 2012 has largely been an unkind one for Minnesota sports fans. Losses mounted quickly as quarterbacks were battered, shootouts were squandered in embarrassing fashion, and all kinds of collateral ligaments were torn asunder. Our most successful team percentage-wise--Gophers' basketball--possessed zero players who wanted to even attempt a shot in a late-game, high-pressure situation against Michigan State one month ago. The past year has been so bad for our big-time sports teams that you could make a compelling argument that the best Minnesota athlete of the past year was actually the guy who finished 2011 as the top-ranked American tennis player in the world: Mardy Fish. And he's only a Minnesotan inasmuch as he learned to burp and crawl and use a potty here before his family moved to Florida when he was four years old.

Whether it's warranted or not, Minnesota fans have a reputation for loudly applauding our occasional flashes of brilliance and largely condoning the long periods of subsequent mediocrity. We break audience decibel-level records when we make the World Series, but mostly, we hope that our general managers know what they're doing when they bring in the Mike Lambs and Kim Johnssons of the sports world to fix our teams' glaring holes. And as the win-loss records show, the past 12 to 18 months in particular have been a special kind of emotional beat-down for the followers of the most prominent local squads.

Now, there have been signs of life with certain squads lately. The Wolves have again become a hot ticket with their exciting brand of play this season, and both big-money Gophers squads (with the promising late-season look of Jerry Kill's squad and a dangerous Hollins-Mbakwe duo on the 2012-13 horizon) look as though they might finally be heading in an upward trajectory. But it seems for every Kevin Love 40-point outing we've celebrated, there has been, say, a Zack Bowman signing that makes Vikings fans wonder if our front office remembers what a competent football player looks like and threatens to drag the whole fan base a little deeper into the dredges.

What I (and several of my friends, who will occasionally contribute as writers and editors) hope to do through this site is analyze, criticize, yell and scream, stomp and cheer, and generally translate Minnesota fandom into the written word. You can expect to check us out a couple times a week for new content here in our infancy. I'm especially excited to try out a few original types of blog posts, including installments of the "21 Years..." series, in which we count down various lists of the top 21 athletes, events, and...I don't know, local beers that have helped define and shape life as a Minnesota sports fan in the time since our last major professional or collegiate title. You can also expect to find Game of the Week breakdowns; commentaries and columns; occasional tangents into topics like local music, un-American football, and video games; and a live blog or two, once I figure out how to work this here Internet device.

We're Minnesota. We're the fan base that knows more about the symptoms and ramifications of bilateral leg weakness than any other in the country. We're the state whose catered food is apparently so bad, it can serve as the catalyst for the messy departure of a beloved Hall of Fame-caliber athlete. We're the people who ask to be circled by a Dutchman who loves his flatulence, and we hold up signs at our one championship-caliber team's playoff games that say "At Least We Got Da Lynx."

Sometimes fatalistic, often irrational, occasionally analytical, always entertaining. The qualities of the fans I have met while rooting for the teams of this state are the ones that I hope come through most evidently on this website. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go celebrate a nail-biter of a Timberwolves victory over the cellar-dwelling Bobcats by muttering complaints about Anthony Tolliver into a Soco Seven.

**Special thanks right off the bat goes out to Tim Lien for putting all the balls on a rack, just how I wanted them, in the header design.