The one that got away

Posted on March 7, 2013 by Risto

On the top shelf in our basement, there’s a brown cardboard box with dozens of baseball hats in it. I don’t know the exact number, but if I say forty, I won’t be off by more than five, either way. And those are hats that aren’t in active rotation, because those forty or so, are in a metal basket next to our front door.

On my way out, I grab the one that matches my mood, if not always my clothes.

Nobody needs close to hundred baseball hats, of course. I didn’t want a hundred hats originally. All I wanted was one.

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He believes he can fly

Posted on February 28, 2013 by Risto

Like many, or most, small boys, I, too, had ideas about the future, and what the world would look like when I grew up. Well, I had one idea. I thought it would be neat – that is the technical term for it – if the roads and streets of Finland were covered by a similar electric ceiling like the bumper cars at Linnanmäki, the amusement park in Helsinki.

I also thought it would be neat if all the streets in Helsinki would freeze over so I could just skate to school every day.

Anoher one bites the ice chips.

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Frozen

Posted on February 23, 2013 by Risto

It’s never cold in the beginning. My fingers still work, so I can take photos with my mobile, and do a Facebook check-in. The cold doesn’t hit until the last ten minutes of the hour, and by then, I’m so close to going home I know I’ll make it out of there alive.

I look down to my feet, and I see that I’ve managed to stomp a perfect square into the snow, and that makes me happy. I’d smile, but the muscles on my face won’t move anymore. I look out to the ice to see if Daughter is still skating around in circles. She is. I look at the clock at the other end of the field, and note that I still have seven minutes to go.

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Awkward non-silence

Posted on February 20, 2013 by Risto

When I was a kid, and home alone after school, I sometimes stood in front of the mirror in the hall holding another mirror, and gaze into the mirror tunnel I saw in front of me. I used to stand there and think it was an entrance to another world.

Decades later, when I was a single man living the single man’s life, it sometimes happened that on a Sunday afternoon, while watching a rerun of “Friends”, I realized that I hadn’t spoken with another person since Friday night when I had left the office.

Now, that didn’t mean that I hadn’t spoken at all, or opened my mouth one bit. I’d most likely been singing along classic 1980s hits, or laughing out loud – back then nobody LOLed – and speaking to the talking heads on TV, even arguing with them.

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Fasth goes mental

Posted on February 16, 2013 by Risto

Anaheim Ducks goalie Viktor Fasth had a lot of physical work to do to overcome a knee injury while playing in Sweden.

He also had some mental changes to make.

Fasth told Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter he once threw his goalie stick 17 rows into the crowd. When his former AIK goalie coach Stefan Persson tells the story, he stops at row 7 — but you get the picture.

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Fasth’s road to the NHL

Posted on February 16, 2013 by Risto

When goalie Viktor Fasth signed a two-year contract with Stockholm AIK in 2010, it was barely news in Sweden. The biggest morning paper, Dagens Nyheter, had a three-line blurb about it, and Aftonbladet, the biggest daily, pulled the general manager’s comments off AIK’s website.

No wonder. AIK played in the second- and third-tier leagues for years and had just then, in 2010, earned promotion to the Swedish Elite League. Fasth, too, spent his career in the second- and third-tier leagues, and had just signed his first SEL contract at 27.

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Kekäläinen

Posted on February 13, 2013 by Risto

Seemed like a good day to dust off this profile on Jarmo Kekäläinen, the Columbus Blue Jackets new GM, who at the time of the story was the St. Louis Blues’ assistant GM.

Click below for the story. Here’s a pdf version.

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The Slovak Code

Posted on February 9, 2013 by Risto

Greetings from Poprad, Slovakia. Ďakujem. That’s all I can say in Slovak, and while I know it’s not much, according to my mother it’s the most important word in the world. It means “thank you”.

I’m here to cover the women’s Olympic qualification hockey tournament, and – as far as I can tell – I am the only reporter who’s not either from Slovakia or Japan.

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The year of the flying glove

Posted on February 5, 2013 by Risto

Finland in November is a dark place as it is, but in 1991, it was darker than ever. The housing bubble had burst, several banks went bankrupt, and the unemployment rate shot from 3.5 percent in 1990 to 12 percent by the end of 1992.

And there he was, a 22-year-old, baby-faced part-time kindergarten teacher who had scored an incredible 36 goals in 35 games in the Finnish second-tier league, to follow up on his 43 goals in 33 games in major junior the year before. His club, Jokerit, had been on the brink of bankruptcy for years and was demoted to the second-tier league. In his four years with the team, Jokerit not only got promoted back to the elite league, they won the Finnish championship in 1992.

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Lorem Ristom

Posted on February 4, 2013 by Risto

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit! Duis elementum neque in sem scelerisque quis dapibus diam adipiscing – very adipiscing. Pellentesque mollis arcu ac enim tincidunt volutpat. Sed facilisis dapibus convallis.

Romanes eunt domus.

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