A whole lot of people, gazing upon the current baseball scene, will be puzzled, or amused, or saddened, or downright bewildered. Anything, that is, except a knowing shrug.
The World Series champions languish in the cellar and reel from tragedy. A small-market benchmark that hasn’t enjoyed a winning season in 15 years, or sniffed the post-season in a quarter-century, has a comfortable division lead.
Old men are finding their power stroke again, cloud or no cloud. An entire series was snowed out, but the team most affected still rises to first place...

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They arrive, by the hundreds, hours before face-off at HSBC Arena. They mingle, eat, drink, whoop it up and stay in high spirits well into the Buffalo night. Young children and seasoned grandparents, and every demographic in between.
And they don’t even have tickets.
Such is the scene now, as a title-starved city follows its beloved Sabres to the brink of the Stanley Cup again. True, four teams remain, but the urgency in Buffalo dwarfs the pleas heard from Ottawa, Anaheim or Detroit these days.
What’s different in 2007, as compared to 2006, goes beyond the blue and gold on the sweaters...

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In the days ahead, an obscene amount of time will be devoted to see which person gets the most votes on that glorified karaoke show that turns up Tuesday and Wednesday nights on Fox. You can’t avoid hearing about it, even if you wanted to.
Here’s an idea to make that show more fun. Have one of the final two (perhaps the 17-year-old) go up on that stage and, for laughs, start with, “They tried to make me go to rehab/but I said no, no no”.
That’s the first unforgettable line of Amy Winehouse’s American breakthough, “Back to Black”. She’s 23, white and British, but hearing her, you could swear she was 40 and a soul sister from Detroit...

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Driving into the lane, he knew what to expect – a double team, at least. He had seen it all night, and this situation, in the last seconds of regulation and his team down two points, was not any different.
Here, tradition and logic and marketing would dictate that, despite the two guys in his face, he would put up the shot – maybe sink it, maybe not. Either way, he would be the center of attention, as always, the singular reason why his team won or lost.
Except that someone was in the right corner, open as can be. So he dished it out, and suddenly you had a perfect 3-point look to win it...

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