Minnesota Wild vs. Montreal Canadiens: Game Recap

For the enemy perspective, please visit Habs Eyes On The Prize

For all the newcomers and visitors here, here is an explanation of why this game is important to me: I'm from New-Brunswick, Canada, Quebec's neighboring Province. By default, this makes most New-Brunswicker Habs fans. Where I live, in North-Eastern New Brunswick, the concentration of fans of Le Tricolore is even stronger because the region is predominately French. What does that make me? A very lonely Wild fan amidst a sea of Habs fans in New-Brunswick. I've seriously never seen another Wild fan in New-Brunswick. Ever. You can imagine how hurt I was when the Wild suffered their worst loss in franchise history against the Habs last year, 8-1. You can probably guess I was hoping for a better game... it certainly didn't start very well.

Alexei Emelin DESTROYS Erik Cole (his teammate). March 1st 2012 (via

The game would head to an unlikely OT. The Habs didn't seem to want to try anything at all until the last minute or so in which they bombarded Harding, but the back-up stood tall and we were headed to the shootout. Without Koivu...or Christensen...or Backstrom...against one of the worst teams in the shootout, the Canadiens... No way to predict what would happen, but I predicted, before the game started, that the benching of Christensen would lead the Wild to lose in the shootout.

What will be lost in the mayhem of Setoguchi's failed shootout attempt will be the fact that the Wild came back from a 3-goal deficit in the final 4 minutes. Also, while Setoguchi failed, he's the reason they even made it in the shootout, so it's hard to be too hard on the guy. Of course, why this had to happen against the Habs is beyond me. The Wild just don't like me, I guess.

Overall, good job on the stolen point Wild, but next time, try to play a full 60 minute game, will ya? Especially against the dead-last team in the East and dead-last team in the NHL (Columbus). When you look at every part of this game, it was actually quite ugly. Both teams seemed to have trouble making plays at certain points, some questionable acts for White, Peters, Clutterbuck and Campoli and some bloopers for both teams too. Anyway, another year, another loss, another season of laughing and jeering from my friends. At least it wasn't 8-1 this time, but did Seto really have to fall? Sigh.