Zednik injury overshadows Sabres win.

As sports fans we tend to invest plenty of time, emotion, and money into sports, their leagues, and the teams and players that we follow. We celebrate long into the night after a big win. We lose sleep and feel sick to our stomach for days at a time following a gutwrenching loss. We bitch about a team that seems to be underacheiving and can’t hang onto late two goal leads, and we worry intensely about losing our pro football team. We spend hours poring over the successes and failures of our fantasy football teams, and plenty more filling out a gazillion bracket pools come every March. I could go on and on.

And every now and then, these same athletic events give us a moment in time that makes all the above seem incredibly irrelevant and somewhat silly by comparison.One of those moments took place in tonight’s game at about the halfway point of the third period of a tie game as Panther Olli Jokinen fell weirdly to the ice and in the process slashed the neck of his teammate Richard Zednik with a skate.

It happened so quickly that one would have to have been following closely to see it. The play had moved further down the ice when a huge collective gasp came from the crowd as Zednik raced frantically toward the Panther bench covering his neck as best he could while leaving a gory trail of blood from the spot where he had been slashed. It was a frightening scene better left for a horror flick, or maybe at the Aud about 1989ish.

I’d never heard the building so quiet, you could hear a pin….hell, you could hear a feather hit the ground at that moment. The game was delayed obviously, if nothing else to clear the ice of its newfound red color.

After about fifteen minutes the PA announcer stated that Zednik was stabilized and that brought a big cheer and standing ovation from the sellout crowd. A salute from the gallery for those who went right to work to keep a catastrophic injury, if not worse from occurring.

The game ended soon after, and it was easy to see that players’ minds weren’t fully on hockey at that moment. None moreso than Jokinen who clearly seemed to be shaken and despondent about it to the point where he went off at a reporter for asking a question “how scared were you” deemed unworthy by him.

Lindy was more matter of fact in his post game comments. “We’re going to have to finish…I don’t if you
(the players) can put yourself in the right mindset because after that, it wasn’t about the game.”

The Zednik incident overshadowed what was a darned good effort by the Sabres in getting a 5-3 win over the Panthers. Special teams were successful in converting three power play goals, two of them coming in the third stanza to break a 3-3 deadlock. And Patrick Kaleta scored his first career NHL goal on a tip in of a blast from Adam Mair. Said Kaleta “When I heard the buzzer go off I did a little swoop to the ice and did a Lambeau Leap into the boards”.

At last report, Zednik is in surgery at Buffalo General in stable condition.

The W keeps the Sabres just one point out of eighth place in the standings, next up is a road game in Ottawa.