A fine day all around, Wednesday.  Mitt Romney, Ted Olsen, The Smart Guys (Erwin Chemerinsky and John Eastman), Lynne Cheney and Jeffrey Toobin.  So much show it almost leaves you breathless. And yet, that was just the beginning of the night for me.

Coach Jerry is somewhat of a local icon in Southern California, and a former friend of Hugh Hewitt. The Coach is one of these guys who will call you out of the blue, talk a little shop, and then see if you want amazing tickets to go see a game, whether it's baseball, basketball or hockey.  Usually, the call goes to Hugh.  Tonight, Hugh fell like the Trojans out of the Coach Jerry top ten, and the Generalissimo climbed up the call list with a bullet.  The venue?  The Honda Center, home of the Stanley Cup winning Anaheim Ducks, in their first home game as reigning champions.  Just the opportunity to see the pregame production, including a spotlit Stanley Cup descending from the scoreboard high overhead from a silver cage to thunderous applause, and seeing the Stanley Cup banner hoisted high over center ice, definitely was the first part of the perfect sports night.

The video package showed the Ducks' path to the Cup last seaon, including an absolute thumping of their first round opponent, the Minnesota Wild. When the Ducks-Wild series highlights were shown, there was a lustful booing of the Wild players.  I keep being told about Minnesota being the state of hockey and all, but I think I'm going to have to send the knitted and embroidered cloth replica of the Stanley Cup banner that all fans got as a souvenir on the way out to my friend Jay Larson, so he can get a sense of what it must be like to actually see hockey played on winning ice. 

The icing on the cake?  The opponent tonight was the Boston Bruins, which feature a seven foot Croatian basketball player on skates and a bunch of other guys with sticks who essentially skated around a lot and didn't really do anything.  The final score was 2-1 Ducks.  Finally, at least for 24 hours, us SoCal people can relish in the fact that a Boston team sucks.  It doesn't completely ease the pain of the Angels' anemic performance against the Red Sox last week, but it sure helps.