He Really Lightens the Load

Before, I skate with 200 pounds on my back. Now, it is just the wind.”

--Teemu Selanne

*

What a wild and wondrous wind it was Friday, blowing through the Pond in unpredictable bursts, widening eyes and drying throats.

On the night Paul Kariya returned to the Ducks, so did something else.

“The magic,” said machinist Gerry Wolf, an original season-ticket holder, standing in the concourse after one period, shaking his head as if he had just seen a ghost.

It was unreal, whatever it was.

It was a hockey player returning to the ice for the first time in more than seven months and outperforming everyone else.

It was a hockey player appearing from nowhere, doing everything, from sprinting to juking to brilliantly passing to, yes, even scoring.

The Mighty Ducks defeated the Washington Capitals and former Duck coach Ron Wilson, 6-4, but this was not about a score or a feud.

For the first time this year here, it was about only hockey.

It was about nearly three hours of howling with the light.

It was about Paul Kariya.

He missed 32 games?

He did not miss 32 games.

Maybe he did not play them with the Ducks, but he played them somewhere. Nobody steps back on the ice and dances like that after missing 32 games.

Somewhere outside Vancouver there must be a small pond with some impossible skid marks and dazzled ice fishermen.

“It’s scary,” said teammate Selanne, and indeed it was.

Only 40 seconds into the game, Kariya flicked a perfect pass to a stunned Dmitri Mironov, who missed the shot.

Five minutes later, while playing for the penalty-killing team, Kariya stole the puck, banked it off the boards past Phil Housley, and made a perfect pass to a stunned Joe Sacco.

Who, like Mironov, missed the shot.

Seventeen minutes into the game, the Capitals led, 3-0, against a team that obviously had no idea what to do with its new toy.

“There’s a lot of faces on this team I don’t recognize,” Kariya said.

So he finally looked to his old pal and the player who spoke to him three times a week during his contract stalemate.

With less than a minute left in the first period, Selanne cut across the middle, took a pass from Mironov, flicked it behind him.

There was you-know-who, who took the pass, paused a second, then flicked it to a streaking Selanne like John Stockton to Karl Malone on the pick-and-roll.

Goal, Selanne. Standing ovation, Kariya.

“With Paul, it’s like I close my eyes and I know where he is,” Selanne said.

By the end of the second period, the score was tied, 4-4. And even though the Ducks had only scored that many goals five times this season, nobody was surprised.

“Now that Paul is here, everything falls into place,” Warren Rychel said. “Checkers can go back to checking. Defensemen can go back to playing defense.”

And Kariya can go back to joining Kobe Bryant as the most exciting athlete in town.

That fourth goal was his goal, the first of the season, as only Kariya can do it. He took a pass from Selanne, danced around Peter Bondra, and nailed a 40-footer.

The ensuing standing ovation lasted more than 40 seconds.

Not that Kariya tried to earn his entire new $14-million contract in one night, but . . .

* In the second period, he tied a club record with seven shots on goal.

* He was on the ice for each of the club’s six goals.

* He scored four points, more in one game than defenseman Jason Marshall has scored in the team’s 33 games.

Before Friday, the Ducks had been winless in their last five games, shut out five times in 12 games, with three wins in their last 15 games.

Not to mention, they had sold out only six of 14 home games after selling out 115 of their previous 130 games.

But overnight, that all seemed to change.

“The season begins tonight,” claimed Wolf, and most of the sellout crowd agreed.

Some booed when Kariya was introduced--”Kariya stinks!” shouted Stacy Mollard, 18, another original season-ticket holder with her parents.

She later added, “It didn’t make any sense for him to stay out that long. I thought it was kind of creepy.”

But by the end of the game, it seemed everyone was on his side.

Which didn’t leave much for Ron Wilson, which was the worst part of Friday.

The Ducks do not introduce the visiting coach, so you can imagine that they did not break from tradition Friday, leaving Wilson without a chance to be welcomed by the fans he once charmed.

Then, just as a few began chanting his name when the Capitals took a 3-0 lead, Kariya set up the first-period goal to make everyone forget again.

“I was telling my friends that 50% of the puzzle is back,” Wolf said after the first period. “All we need is Wilson.”

Of course, it’s not going to work that way. Duck fans are going to have to live with what they have.

For now, for the first time since last spring, that seems plenty.