Ducks Offer Chance for Feel-Good Season

Feeling certain that the Anaheim Mighty Ducks would arrive home from their longest road trip of the year and be so happy to play at the Pond they would certainly beat the slow-starting Boston Bruins, this was going to be a feel-good story.

This was going to be about how the Ducks have a chance to grab the emotions of the Southern California sports fan. It has been a discouraging weekend, after all.

Our major college football teams seem confused (USC) and got crushed (UCLA). It is not a ton of fun watching the NFL team that was once ours, the Rams, stay undefeated for St. Louis. The Mike Tyson debacle makes you sick to your stomach if you wasted any time watching on TV or any money watching in person. There is no reason, yet, to be particularly hopeful that the Lakers will be any different this year than last, even with Phil Jackson. Clippers? Does anyone care?

The Angels seemed all set to hire a general manager. Then negotiations apparently fell apart and so the baseball team that might still be for sale still has no one in charge of the operation. Or a manager either. All the hot candidates are being hired by other teams. At least, though, the Angels didn’t do what the Chicago Bears did last year. The Bears actually held a press conference to announce a new coach. But the coach turned down the contract and never showed up.

And it can’t warm the hearts of many Californians to watch the New York Yankees take two giant steps toward another World Series title. Who of us ever wants New York to win anything?

But our Ducks, now here’s something. Paul Kariya and Teemu Selanne are both exquisitely talented and enormously appealing personalities. The team, at its best, is an elegant, offensively attacking club that should always entertain.

And so please ignore this singularly uninspiring 3-2 loss suffered by the Ducks Sunday night. There were plenty of empty seats, which means not all that many of you saw this in person. One hopes those of you at home were watching the touching introduction of baseball’s Team of the Century at Turner Field in Atlanta (Mark McGwire couldn’t suck it up and wear khakis and loafers instead of jeans and gym shoes for one night?) and not Boston’s Sergei Samsonov sending a puck between the skates of a Duck, picking it up on the other side and scoring.

At least the Ducks know they should have won this game. The win was only Boston’s second of the season. The first had come Saturday night in San Jose.

Coming off a long road trip can be dangerous. The Ducks knew this. Coach Craig Hartsburg told them this. “We knew exactly what was going to happen,” Paul Kariya said afterward. “A good team does things differently.”

No excuses. Now there’s something refreshing from a local sports team. No whining about injuries or missing players or lack of effort or lack of leadership.

Plain and simple, Hartsburg said, the Ducks chose to play on only one side of the puck against Boston for two periods. The offensive side. Not good enough, Hartsburg said, and it shouldn’t happen again, Hartsburg said.

At first it is hard to warm to this straight-backed, straight-haired, straight-faced coach. But there is undeniable desire in Hartsburg’s heart as well as a willingness to be honest and an unwillingness to ever make things better or worse than they are.

It is impossible not to like the stars, Kariya and Selanne, who always talk. About wins, about losses, about good and bad. The devil incarnate, if you listen to certain members of other teams, Ruslan Salei, stood shyly in the hallway, neatly dressed in suit and tie, hair pushed behind his ears. He said hello and that he was eager to return from his 10-game suspension for shoving Dallas’s Mike Modano into the boards in the season opener. Salei looks like he could use some friends. He can’t be all bad, can he?

If ever the Ducks are to make a big impact, a lasting impact here, this might be the year.

We are all eager for a winning team and an entertaining team. A team with players who seem happy to be playing their sport and able to do so at a high level. We have seen the Angels. And the Dodgers. And USC and UCLA. We see people all over the rest of the country cheering their lungs out. Why can’t it happen here?

So, stubbornly, let’s stick to the belief that the Ducks can be that team. Having fallen behind 3-0 Sunday night, to their credit, the Ducks did not pack it in. A goal was scored with 1 minute 12 seconds left in the game to close the gap to 3-2. At least the 14,712 fans at the Pond left feeling encouraged and wanting more. “I can’t wait to come back,” a little boy said to his dad on the way out. “I think the Ducks will really want to win next time. Like they did in the third period.”

There you have it, Ducks. Let’s have a winner. Southern California needs a winner. Southern California wants a winner. So, Ducks, be the winner.

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Diane Pucin can be reached at her e-mail address: [email protected]