Despite the season starting sometime in early 2024, we have finally crowned champs. It was these bums…
Talk about an all-star team and Dixon.
Italy pulled what is now known as the “VV”. They hide one of their top players from playing all season, get a mid-season replacement of a good caliber, and then the other guy comes back for the playoffs after having played one game all season. Diabolical. We are not the NHL, and salary caps will be imposed for the playoffs moving forward.
Semifinals: #2 Italy vs #3 Russia
This game was oddly close for two periods. Both teams traded a few goals here and there. Russia had to dig into the depths of Czechia’s bench just to field a team as Russia captain Jaiden Hernandez was out nursing his bruised ego from not being mentioned in the recaps as much as he would have liked the prior week.
Of course there was mountains of bitching and moaning coming from the Italy bench as league-leading scorer Brandon Popham dressed for a depleted Russia bench. They then tossed BVV, Jr, and just to make things interesting, Ashton out on the first line.
Scoring was low as Russia was matching goals with Italy, but they could only do so much. With a short bench and Italy finally clicking, Russia was buried under an avalanche of goals in the third as they took this one 7-3.
Finals: #1 Czechia vs #2 Italy
What can you say about this game? Italy playing the extra game worked in their favor as they didn’t need any warm up. Czechia, on the other hand, showed their rust after having not played for 7 months and a year. Italy rolled out to a commanding 4-0 lead after the first, but to be fair, 3 of their goals were weird bounces. We’d like to fault Czechia goalie Taylor Newton for those, so we will. He should have had all of them.
The second period went a little better. Czechia only gave up two goals while civil war was brewing on the bench. Near the end of the second, an unnamed person in the direction of the benches shouted “Shut Out!” in hopes of making sure Italy goalie Felipe Rodriguez wouldn’t hang the embarrassment on Czechia.
Similar to the semifinals for Italy, after two periods, Czechia finally started to put it together. Czechia captain Andrew Minerd finally got his team on the board and Czechia would rally for two more to make the final a little more respectable at 6-3 in favor of Italy.
It needs to be said that Popham, after leading the league in scoring, all but vanished in the one game that mattered.
And with that whimper of a game, the winter season that never ended finally concluded.
The quote of the night came during the after-game party when newcomer Faye Hadley said, “I hope you shit on me this week,” while handing out bags of white powder after hours in a park. We have no idea what the context of that comment was, and we hope you found what you were looking for.