I'm looking forward to the Olympic hockey competition.  I think Canada has a great chance to win a gold medal at home and that the USA also has a chance for some hardware.  I also wish that we were still playing with amateurs instead of the NHL All-Stars.

Yes, the NHL players have raised the bar for competition, but this year, with the Chicago Blackhawks playing so well, you hate to see a two week break in the schedule.  The Hawks, in case you've not been paying attention, have won four straight.  They've won forty games quicker than any Hawks team in history, including the great Hawk teams of the early seventies.  They have the third highest point total in the league, two points behind San Jose and three points behind Washington. They are second highest in goals scored and second lowest in goals against. 

It's a perfect Blackhawks storm this year and if you are a Hawk fan in your mid-forties, you really are thinking that maybe, just maybe, this will be the year that the Hawks win that Stanley Cup denied them by Montreal almost forty years ago.  Having seen the Bears, Bulls and White Sox win championships as an adult, this would be the final piece of my sports puzzle.  I want this one pretty bad (though not as bad as another World Series championship.  This was unreal.)

You wonder how this is going to play out.  Will the six Hawks players participating in the games come back tired and sluggish or not in one piece?  Will the goalies get rusty from not having played at game speed for two weeks?  The goalies are already an issue with this team, I wonder how inactivity will affect them? 

Coach Q was upbeat about it yesterday saying that he hopes that the Olympic Hawks have a positive experience in the tournament and bring that experience back to the team.  He also says that competing for gold is like playing for Lord Stanley's Cup and he hopes that this taste of competition will make the players hungry for more.

Let's hope he's right. I'd hate to see this season go up in smoke because of the Olympics. After all, gold is good, but Lord Stanley is much better.