It’s been a long 59 months since the NHL shut its doors and pulled the plug on the season back in March of whatever year this is.
As time — of which I have lost all sense of — slowly trudged on from that fateful shutdown day and the scope of the global pandemic’s potential prowess on the sports world became at least a little more clear, it proved harder and harder to really believe we’d get to this point, within a hair’s length of a midsummer resumption of the NHL campaign that would have, under normal circumstances, concluded like a month-and-a-half ago.