I’m going to be insanely fast tonight as I have a 4 a.m. wakeup call to get out of dodge.

I take it back. Kiszla was right.

Talk about an ugly hockey game full of silliness. I never thought this would end. The Wild got so chippy out there, Peter Forsberg didn’t leave the bench in the third to protect him.

The Wild took a team-playoff-record 111 penalty minutes. Derek Boogaard played 2:03 and got 24 minutes of penalties. Stephane Veilleux, running around endlessly, took eight penalties, totaling 35 minutes.

However, the referees, who were trying to keep control of this mayhem, somehow gave him a misconduct with 11:30 left in the third period but let him stay in the game after serving a five-minute fighting major.

So even though his night should have been over, he was on at the 20-minute mark and took 12 minutes more worth of penalties.

The Wild put Colorado on 13 power plays, a Wild record.

It was just a mess, although somehow Chris Simon got zero PIM’s. That’s equivalent to Colorado scoring five goals and Paul Stastny not getting a point.

The Wild’s overworked defensemen lost this game. Turnovers galore in the first period, and all six defensemen played big roles in the disaster as I documented in my rewritten gamer for the web site.

Of all players, Jacques went hard after Martin Skoula. He also went after Petteri Nummelin, who couldn’t even move at times, and 38-year-old Keith Carney and Sean Hill.

The Wild has one day to regroup back in St. Paul before Thursday’s Game 5. Practice isn’t til 4:30 Wednesday, so expect a very late blog update.

I’d say the series outlook looks a little different than it did 24 hours ago, eh?

This was not shocking to me. The Wild has done this all year. Letdowns when it can go for the kill.

Now it’s a series again.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 16th, 2008 at 1:02 am and is filed under Game coverage. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.