Sports Redux: It's Not The Stanley Cup, But It'll Do For Now

Sure, if you win the Stanley Cup, you get your name engraved on it, you get to take it home for a day to do whatever you want with it, and kids from Yellowknife to Halifax go to bed dreaming of it. But still, when your year is over, you usually have to give it back. Usually to the Red Wings.

An indivdual award, though, is forever. (We Rationalize Anything. $19.95) And in the hockey-mad city of Las Vegas yesterday, the NHL handed out its individual awards, and the Bruins were front and center. First, congratulations to Coach of the Year Claude Julien. We didn't know anything about him when he came to town, but we've come to love his dedication to his players, his pithy quotes, and his rubber-faced reaction shots. Well done, Coach.

Also picking up awards were Zdeno Chara, who won the Norris Trophy for outstanding defenseman of the year, and Tim Thomas, who gets the Vezina trophy for the year's best goalie. Hey, maybe he'll be on the All-Star Ballot next year. If you want happy quotes from happy hockey players, and who doesn't, the Globe has all you need.

The Red Sox rewarded the fans brave enough to show up for their 501st consecutive sellout by playing five+ innings in the rain, waiting two and a half hours for the rain to stop, which everyone and their grandmother knew wasn't going to happen, then getting a crummy short-game 2-1 loss to the Marlins. Jon Lester gave up two solo homers, Kevin Youkilis hit one, which was the only hit off Ricky Nolasco, and then the weather ended the night. Eventually.

Mike Lowell, for one, thinks that last night was a fiasco. We'll step aside and let him take the rest of this paragraph: "There was nothing we were told or saw on the radar that suggested that we were going to be playing in any type of good conditions. I think a lot of guys are [expletive] pissed right now, just from my experience with the Marlins and hurricanes...I’m just saying that what we saw on the radar was 100 percent chance of rain basically from 7:30 on. I’m frustrated and I think a lot of guys are frustrated."

If and when the Globe goes down, we can be proud they went down swinging, as they're taking the "damn the torpedoes" approach and sending Dan Shaughnessy to California to consider Manny Ramirez's return.

And if you know anyone from South Dakota, tell them to get themselves to the new Patriots Museum in Foxborough pronto. Every other state has sent a representative, and the first...(what's a person from S.D. called? It's not cornhusker...it's not sooner...what is it?)....to visit gets free prizes.