Holy COW! I knew hockey fights were popular, but I never in my wildest dreams expected this!

There was a major brouhaha at last Sunday's Phantoms game. The Binghamton Senators were in town, and they were leading 4-1 with 3:50 remaining in the game when all chaos broke loose. I am going to track down some links to game recaps and post them here, rather than go into it myself, but the long and short of it was that there were four consecutive line brawls, where everyone on the ice was involved in a fight. In the first two brawls, this included the goaltenders (except for Antero Niittymaki, our goalie who came into the game when Neil Little was ejected).

So, what am I surprised about? The number of visitors that my Phantoms/Senators photos on clubphoto.com received so far. The album has barely existed online for 24 hours. But I posted a link on two Flyers boards I visit, someone I shared the album with posted the link to a Phantoms e-mail discussion list, and someone ELSE (I don't know who) must have seen it in one of those three places. The unknown person posted it to a very well-known online hockey fight board, and the number of visits to the album proceeded to go straight through the roof.

I keep checking the second page of my Club Photo album and marvelling at the visitor count. I uploaded the photos almost exactly 24 hours ago, and it's already had 1850 visitors. Unbelievable! :o)

Anyway, tonight or tomorrow I'll treasure-hunt for links to recaps and the online video clip of Neil Little LITERALLY leaping into a pileup of brawling players. It's such an incredible visual that it made its way to ESPN's SportsCenter and TSN's (Canada's) Sports Centre as well. Apparently it was #3 on ESPN's "top plays of the day", and the announcer reputedly said something to the effect of "I know this is a bad lesson for the kids, but THAT... WAS... AWESOME!" LMHO!!! I sure wish I'd seen THAT evaluation. Too funny!

You go, Neil! Ya big lunatic! Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course. :o)