The buzz was still in the air down the X 14 hours or so after Marian Gaborik completed the game of his life.

To put in perspective how great of an achievement Gaborik’s five-goal game was, from 1975-96, there were one, two or three five-goal games in the NHL virtually every year. Since 1996, zero.

That just shows how this game has changed into a tight-checking, faster, massive-goaltending game.

There were some comical things that happened down at the arena, like Wild legend Ryder Rolston, one of Brian’s three sons, heckling a blushing Gaborik beyond belief.

The entire locker room was in hysteria, it was so funny. He kept asking him why he wasn’t good enough to score six, then called him a sieve 100 times. See, the team of 18,000 is a bad influence.

Brian said Ryder picked that word up at Thursday’s game when the crowd screamed it at Henrik Lundqvist. He used it on Gabby. It was pretty funny stuff.

Gaborik admitted he was in such a high after last night’s game, he didn’t get to sleep until after 2. “Tried to pinch myself to make sure it was real.”

He’s been inundated with phone calls and text messages from family and friends. Pretty cool stuff.

Obviously tomorrow’s a big game. The Wild would love to go into the Christmas break on a high by beating the best team in the NHL, Detroit. Easier said than done.

Obviously one way would be to solve Henrik Zetterberg and Pavel Datsyuk, who lit the Wild up a few weeks back. Mike Babcock had the last line change at home and got his two superstars on the ice against Gaborik and Pavol Demitra all night.

Jacques Lemaire said this afternoon he’s not afraid of that matchup tomorrow night if things transpire that way, although with the last line change, I think he’d rather Domimic Moore’s checking line face those two studs.

Of course, Babcock has a tendency to split the two forwards up on the road. Wild will catch a break. Tomas Holmstrom, one of the league’s best net crashers, injured his knee last night and is not playing.

I’ll throw some more stuff up as I transcribe. Good day.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 21st, 2007 at 2:19 pm and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.