50th Post!!!

To celebrate my fiftieth post, I had considered doing a brief "look-back"; but as I played that back in my mind, it became a preachy diatribe highlighting how I proved myself smarter and more righteous than those I typically wrote about. But I stopped, thankfully, and said, Chris, you ain't that smart and you ain't that righteous. So I looked back at the reasons I post, and decided to give glory where glory is called for- with the God that made the animals, created the nature, gave the guidance, passed out the resources, and put up with the stupidity- both that which I exposed and that which I demonstrated. Congratulations, Lord, on 50 posts in 82 days.

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And now, back to the KHL playoffs. Yesterday didn't have much of a buzz to it. Riga finally got on the board against MVD with a 3-1 win ; and Spartak, evildoers that they are, beat Lokomotiv 3-2 to take a 2-1 lead.

However, today was much buzzier. Three of four games went to OT! The one that didn't was Neftekhimik's 1-0 upset of suddenly ice-cold Salavat Yulaev. Andrei Ivanov scored the lone goal and Ivan Kasutin made it stand up between the pipes. Underdog Neftekhimik now holds a 2-1 series lead.
Metallurg and Ak Bars also played a 1-0 game, but it took 5 seconds short of a full period of OT before Petri Kontiola put in his first of the postseason to give Vasily Koshechkin and Metallurg a 1-0 win and brought them back to a 2-1 series against heavily favored Kazan.
Lokomotiv finally figured out how to win an OT game- give the puck to my boy Josef Vasicek, who scored at 7:33 of OT to give Yaroslavl a 4-3 win against Spartak and a tied series at 2-2. As in the previous OTs for Lokomotiv, they scored late to tie (Ivan Tkachenko with 2:23 left in regulation) but this time they finally finished the job after losing once in each series.
But the biggest effort was posted by MVD and Dinamo Riga who played 22 1/2 minutes of OT before Evgeny Fedoerov gave MVD the 5-4 win and a 3-1 series lead. Alexi Tsvetkov scored two straight goals in the second period to give MVD their first lead at 4-3, but Marcel Hossa tied the game with 44 seconds remaining to set up the two-OT finale.
Four 1-goal games, 50:01 of OT play, and two upsets; now that's a night of hockey!