Same as the old boss
The Junior A Crushers have been good at keeping pucks out of their own net so far this season (20 goals in eight games), but haven’t been as good at the other end of the rink (23 goals).
They are generating chances, the players say, they just aren’t cashing in when they get them, so it’s fortunate for them that they’ve been difficult to score against, or they’d be on the wrong side of the .500 mark (at the moment, they have four wins and four losses).
Injuries happen to every team, so you can’t really use that as an excuse, but Pictou County had been without two big pieces of its offence recently: Sullivan Sparkes (suspension) and Kevin Mason (injury).
Sparkes had put up six assists in four games before running afoul of league rules when he took a slashing major two weeks ago, and Mason is a natural goal-scorer who returned to action last week. Getting those two players back in the lineup will only improve their outlook. After months of listening to what the federal political parties say they will do if elected (and what they don’t like about each other) Canadians will head to the polls Oct. 21 to cast their ballots.
Prediction time: in all likelihood, we shall see a Liberal or Conservative minority, which doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing, provided those in government put their tiresome partisan politics aside and get to work. They will do that for a while, but then they’ll stop after a couple of years, so we’ll get to do this all over again, most likely in the first half of 2021. While it doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing, it’ll probably turn out that way.
We don’t see a whole lot of difference between Conservatives and Liberals these days. It’s like that line from an old song by The Who: “Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.”
It’s also like what the old barber in downtown New Glasgow said to me a long time ago: “They say things will change, but things haven’t changed here for years and years.” Central Nova Conservative candidate George Canyon is a sports guy. Canyon, who grew up a Montreal Canadiens fan (interesting, Roger MacKay did as well), has played goaltender in a men’s league in Alberta and for a few seasons skipped the high school curling team at West Pictou (he says he didn’t like the pressure of being a skip) and until this season he sang the national anthems at Calgary Flames home games.
Canyon performed them with subtlety, I might add, avoiding the flashy, note-bending screeches and vocal histrionics supplied by singers such as the young woman who does the anthems prior to Maple Leafs games (great voice, but she overdoes it and needs to dial it down a notch).
Goaltenders, I said to Canyon him the other day, can be weird.
Yes, he replied, they are very superstitious, probably the most superstitious of any position on a hockey team.
Liberal Sean Fraser isn’t much of a sports guy, it seems, although he has done well at those cardboard boat races out Merigomish way.
One time in Merigomish, poor Karla MacFarlane – not a hard-core Conservative, so she’s alright – barely made it into the water before her boat started taking on water, falling apart and sinking fast. It was what it must have been like being on a lifeboat, watching as the Titanic plunged to the depths below. Or, being Roger MacKay's campaign manager. Yeah, like that, too.