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.]