Game Fifteen Recap: Dallas Stars 3, San Jose Sharks 1

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Usually, when you sit down and sift through the different elements of any given game in order to make observations about it as a whole, certain individual elements come to the fore.  So-and-so played well, so-and-so didn’t, there was a mistake here, there was a good play there, the overall tenor was this or that.  In trying to decipher last night’s game, the only thing that is obvious about what went on can be boiled down to two words:

Twilight Zone.

Sitting in the Tank watching events unfold, I kept waiting for Sharks PA announcer Joe Ike to start channeling Rod Serling.  How else can you explain a game where, in no particular order:

• San Jose starts out, keeps going throughout, and finishes the game shooting the puck three ways — hard, often, and utterly ineffectively;
  Meanwhile, Mike Modano decides to see if it’s true about Sharks fans being classy by tying and then breaking the record for most points by an American-born player in NHL history with two first period goals, one of them shorthanded, while Evgeni Nabokov’s play on both was an unspoken “glad to help, and by the way how’s Willa;”
  The on-ice officials apparently thinking it was still Halloween, given the number of phantom calls made while the obvious usually went unnoticed… either that, or checking Jonathan Cheechoo in the back and into the boards is now legal;
  Jeremy Roenick being the only player wearing teal who when hitting an opposition player didn’t look like it was an accidental collision;;
  Getting back to the Modano thing, did I mention he got a standing ovation when it was announced he had tied the record and another round of applause when he broke it?/

All snark aside, this act is getting old.  Joe Thornton looked like he thought shooting the puck was illegal, I’m not altogether certain Patrick Marleau was playing even though he had over seventeen minutes of ice time, and for the Stars Marty Turco was stopping every little and not-so little everything.  Oh yeah, good times all around for Sharks fans.  The biggest question now is what will it take to shake Los Tiburones de San José out of this other dimension of sight, sound, and mind where the sign on the locker room door, instead of ‘authorized personnel only,’ is referred to as the signpost up ahead that says “next stop…”