It’s going to be a good year.

 

The Pittsburgh Penguins won the Stanley Cup, just as I predicted eight years ago. 

In the end, I was wrong on only one series from this year’s NHL playoff: Anaheim upset San Jose, and who wasn’t wrong there?

 

I spent the summer in Washington D.C., an area starved for sports greatness. 

There I saw that bandwagoners of Alex Ovechkin are just as bad as the Crosby bandwagon, though more whiny in their constant disappointment. 

 

The District of Columbia certainly is interesting.

 

Washington is a place where sports are essential, and yet they are all so bad. I spent my time in the only place where the baseball team is worse than Pittsburgh’s.

 

I went to a game at Nationals Park, and it was a lot of fun. Nobody goes. My friends and I bought tickets the day of the game, didn’t even check our seats, but simply sat in a relatively empty section in couch rules, with an empty seat between each of us.

 

As everyone left the stadium as the tie game progressed, and we moved down to the second row from the field to see the winning home run. ‘Twas a pathetic showing of fandom. 

 

I should probably preface that the best way to describe Washington, D.C. is to say that nowhere else can less get done in more time with greater difficulty and cost. That bureaucratic nightmare is seen in all aspects of Washington life (especially the bus system).

 

Washington has no real sports enthusiasm in the way I have seen in Pittsburgh, Buffalo or even Baltimore.

 

Sure, they have the Redskins, and they love to complain about the Redskins, but that’s it. 

 

I could wear any jersey I wanted downtown, because there is no sports passion. There was nobody to heckle me.

 

In fact, the barber in the basement of the United States Department of Agriculture is a Steelers fan born and raised in D.C.

 

I wore a Bills jersey because nobody knew what it was except the two people from Buffalo I met, and furthermore, nobody even noticed it. 

  

The passion for sports doesn’t exist in the District like here, and I must say that it’s good to be back in the Rust Belt.