The good news is, your Buffalo Sabres overcame an early 2-0 goal deficit on the road and beat the conference leading Flyers, 5-3, to keep in the thick of the Eastern Conference playoff chase.
The bad news is, most of Western New York didn't get to share in the experience live. The video feed provided by the Madison Square Garden Network, which also provides the audio simulcast provided by MSG to the Sabres Hockey Network, was wonky for most of the game, and it cut out altogether at the stroke of 3:30, when the MSG production facilities were apparently obligated by contract to switch over to a Big East womens basketball game.
The game remained on MSG's HDTV channel, which enabled the radio station's postgame guy to broadcast his own last few minute play-by-play by reporting what he was seeing on the in-studio video monitor. Much like primordial baseball broadcasters re-created game highlights in the 1940s by reading the plays off of tickertape and dolling them up with sounds of bats and balls and crowd noises manufactured in their own studios.
Later in the post-game, they ran their usual highlights of the goals scored during the game. Most of Rick's calls were crisp and clear, but the final-minute empty-netter, which sealed the win for the Blue and Gold, was flimsy and echoey, clearly recorded by an iPhone or somesuch off the HD television monitor in the radio station's employee lounge or something.
This is what you get when your nightly broadcast rights have been sold out to a network which is not only the broadcast home of one of your conference opponents, but in fact owns the other team. That strange-bedfellowship is an unintended consequence of the demise of the Adelphia Communications empire at the turn of this past century, owned by the dreaded Rigas family, which along the way not only acquired the Sabres ownership but founded a
cable network and an
associated radio station to showcase their games. Now that the Sabres have been purchased by an aggressive new owner, there have been some suggestions favoring the revival of the Empire Sports Network, or something like it, to showcase their games much as YES does the Yankees or SNY does the near-bankrupt Mets.
Note to Ray's file: the squatters on empiresports.com, the actual former domain, lose their current naming rights on May 15, 2011. The somewhat more appropriate empiresports.net, currently parked by a speculator in Zimbabwe, becomes available on April 21st.
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Totally removed from such sport was the film we watched tonight:
Mad Hot Ballroom, a documentary about the use of ballroom-dance competitions in the New York City public schools in the mid-2000s. The dedication, talent and sheer impetuousness of these older-elementary schoolkids were an inspiration to all of us in the room; making it even more touching was the venue of the competition finals.
Eleanor and I visited NYC on the weekend of our engagement, 25 years ago this coming December. We stayed in a now-nonexistent hotel between the towers of the World Trade Center, but in our exploring that weekend, we talked our way into the then-under-contruction Wintergarden of the nearby World Financial Center. That building survived the 9/11 attack, and several years later it served as the host site for these amazing kids from Tribeca and Washington Heights and Forest Hills and Bensonhoist. It's a beautiful recouting of how music and dance can overcome far more obstacles than the two left feet I've been blessed with.
