Last night was pure pleasure for Sens fans: we won on a Saturday night, we won in Montreal so we didn’t have to hear that fucking nananana chant, and we benefited from the steely, heartless assassin that is a motivated Kovalev. (Magnitogorsk Motikovalev is my favorite KHL team.) Karlsson and Gonchar are looking deadly out there on the points, Spezza and Phillips are both playing smart hockey, and the team has won five of the last six. Now we’re rolling.

To celebrate, today is The CCFR Annual Fan Appreciation BBQ, during which the Sens’ biggest super fan was honored for his undying homerism. His favorite player is Daniel Alfredsson, and he thinks Bryan Murray should win GM of the Year for the Gonchar signing. It’s actually pretty annoying how big of a fan he is. I love hockey, but get a life, man.

Steve might be our in-house Photoshop genius, but that doesn’t mean that James doesn’t occasionally get in on the action.

The Leafs have come back down to earth, but let’s not be classless about it. And besides, the Sens are trending up but face Tim Thomas, who has traditionally owned them, and the Bruins, who have a habit of making the offensively-challenged Sens look especially pee-wee by playing Chara 47 minutes a game.

Spezza gets re-inserted into tonight’s lineup, though we lose Michalek for a week. Here’s hoping that Kovalev keeps stirring that pot of black magic and that Spezza wants to impress the scouts in the audience who are there to assess if he’s worth whoever they have on their team who is the equivalent of Milan Michalek. My prediction is 4-1 Bruins, but only because Thomas’ save percentage is threatening to head into negatives and Elliott needs to let in his obligatory two softies. Do we see Lehner tonight? Probably not.

By the way, the Sens Store is having some kind of crazy deal right now where if you buy one jersey you get one of those idiotic black SNES jersies for free. Which, as James pointed out, is pretty damn rare, and others pointed out may indicate a new third jersey is on the way.

Last night Sergei Gonchar was gifted his portrait in honor of his 1000th game. It was a little hard to make it out from where I was seated (second last row, third deck, natch), but The CCFR, being an extremely well-connected organization, has managed to obtain an e-copy of said potrait:

[Extremely big ups to Image Dude Steve for generating this using what we can only assume was a supercomputer.]

Sens play Pens tonight, but I think it’s on a channel that you only receive if you hook up all three current generation video game systems to your credit card and strike the contraption with lightning. Sens will take their weak ass defence into the Pens’ Haunted Xcel Manufacturing Concern. Speaking of haunted, do we give up the ghost on Elliott being a starting goaltender and throw Lehner (and our entire season) in? Can Crosby score his usual three points against the Sens with a folding chair on his wing? Can Fleury stink enough to give Gonchar his first goal as a Senator? Will Kovalev continue to act like a sad panda, refusing everything but bamboo as he slowly starves to death? Tune in (if you can) to find out.

Personally, I think it’s time for the Sens to unveil their secret weapon:

We know it was going to be a loss because it was Hockey Night in Canada. Ottawa can only embarrass itself in front of large audiences. But more importantly, it was yet another game in which Ottawa was badly outshot:

I guess part of this is letting two guys in the top ten in blocked shots walk away, but another is probably that they can’t carry the puck out of their own zone. I think Kovalev is now responsible for strategy in the locker room, piña colada in hand.

We here at The Review applaud those fans who go to such lengths as to individually apply knuckle tattoos (real or virtual) in honor of a team currently 0-for-14 on the powerplay. I’m going to get J-A-R-K-O R-U-U-T-U on mine (including thumbs) and then punch a leafs fan in the junk. (3-0 is their best start since ’99!) Or O-L-E-G(‘s) I-P-O-D, in honor of Oleg Saprykin, who, by the way, was drafted 11th overall back in 1999. That’s looney.

(Put your entries for knuckle tats in the comments.)

In other news, Ottawa has a game against Carolina tonight. TSN will be good enough to show it nationwide rather than a CFL borefest between the Thunderbay Thunder Riders and the North Bay Rider Bats. I predict that Joe Corvo scores 14 goals but finishes -3.

This is it. It’s been a long summer of existential dread, self-doubt and humbling insecurity; meaningless interactions with loved ones about what color to paint the bathroom and playing games with children we can barely bring ourselves to love; reading stories about Ilya Kovalchuk and CBA politics that look like they were written by an escaped gorilla on the back of a napkin; thinking about taking up model ship building and working on that spy novel while fantasizing about all that dead weight we’re gonna shave off the cap next off season and whether we should go after Brad Richards.

It all comes down to this: back-to-back games, Friday and Saturday night, as the Sens open their season against the pathetically boring Buffalo Sabres and the hated Leaves, who stabbed all of our eyeballs last night with yet another 45-minute opening ceremony designed to celebrate their putrid history.

I have 9 beers in my fridge (Mill Street Organic and St. Ambroise Apricot Wheat. REAL MAN’S BEERS.) and my television isn’t HD and this will be the greatest night. Remember the lockout? How the hell did we survive that?

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