When winter finally released its icy grip last week, with temperatures reaching above freezing for the first time in weeks, we had figured the worst of this winter season was behind us.
Needless to say, that was wishful thinking.
As native New Englanders, by no means were we so naive as to believe that Mother Nature would fail to have a few surprises remaining for us.
When March 1 starts to roll along on the calendar, we always are reminded of the proverb we first learned as young children at Our Lady of Grace parochial school in Everett: “March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb.”
So we were well-aware that nasty weather still lay ahead. We were braced for a lion, but we weren’t expecting a prehistoric beast.
So we were both incredulous and exasperated as we listened to the weatherman’s increasingly-dire predictions for a major weather event headed our way as this weekend approached
We’ve all become familiar with the relatively-recent meteorological term of “bombogenesis” to describe the rapid intensification of a storm system that seems to take on a life of its own.
But we did not anticipate the fury of this week’s blizzard that had such a wide impact and that caused so much misery for so many of us.
We well remember the Blizzard of ‘78, the No Name Storm of 1991 (also known as The Perfect Storm), and the Snowmageddon Winter of 2015.
We took all of those major weather events in stride. As impactful as they were, they were simply annoyances for us at the time. But we were younger then, and youth has a way of brushing aside even the harshest of circumstances — a four-foot drift looks like a playground instead of a back injury waiting to happen.
Despite the frigid temperatures, we still ran outside almost every day throughout this winter, even in the face of daily, single-digit wind chills. We were determined not to let Ol’ Man Winter get the better of us.
But truth be told, this winter season of 2026 has pushed us over the edge. The “lion” finally bit us — and Florida suddenly seems very appealing.
Why hasn’t the NHL banned fighting?
Our love of hockey dates back to the 1960s, the golden era when “Bobby Orr and the Big, Bad Boston Bruins” (that was the title of a book that we’ve had since our youth) ruled the hockey world and the B’s were the toast of the town.
We recall the bad blood between the Bruins and some of their notable opponents, the Canadiens and the Rangers (among others), and well recall the game when Derek Sanderson got into a fight with a member of the Chicago Black Hawks — Sandy pulled off an opponent’s jersey and then, while skating around the rink, jersey in hand as if it were a trophy, tossed it into the stands (in Chicago!).
Fighting was not merely just a part of the game, it was even expected. Each team had its “enforcer” who could be expected to take a run at the other team’s star player, which in turn would trigger a retaliatory run by the enforcer on the other side, and mayhem inevitably would be the result.
We were just youngsters at the time and just accepted it as “part of the game.” It was a time when goalies still didn’t wear masks and certainly no player wore a helmet.
Times have changed. Goalies wear expensive masks and every player is helmeted. Teams no longer devote a roster spot to an enforcer and rates of fighting have decreased significantly.
But fighting remains a part of the game and is tolerated to an extent not seen in any other sport. The fans still lust for blood and cheer with every punch. ESPN shows the highlights of every fight.
We were thinking about this as we were watching — and thoroughly enjoying — the Olympic hockey matches these past two weeks. It was so nice to watch a game with no flights and none of the chippiness and illegal hits that are trademarks of the NHL. The teams just skated relentlessly up and down, without the long delays caused by brawling and fighting.
Fighting remains a vestige of pro hockey’s brutal past — and in our view, the sooner the NHL bans it all together (which it could easily do with harsher penalties than just a five-minute major), the better.
The time has come to retire the Rodney Dangerfield joke, “I went to a fight the other night, and a hockey game broke out.”