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Islander Fan Is a Real Trooper

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Army helicopter pilot Roger Farina, a New York Islander fan, was chosen last week to receive the NHL’s 7th Man Award, which means he gets to drop the ceremonial first puck tonight before Game 1 of the Stanley Cup finals between the Ducks and New Jersey Devils.

Farina was chosen for his dedication to his favorite team -- even while on assignments in Kuwait and Iraq, he wore his Islander jersey.

When he learned he had been chosen as the Islanders’ top fan, making him a finalist for the league award, Farina was with his unit in the Middle East.

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“I was in the middle of the chow line and I screamed,” he told Associated Press.

He admitted later his reaction was not the preferred method of celebration in a war zone.

“People are on edge,” he said. “Whenever you scream like that, people are going for their [gas] masks.”

Name game: Farina’s young daughters, Abigale Nystrom and Allyson Gillies, are named after two of his Islander favorites.

Bob Nystrom and Clark Gillies were rugged wingers who played for the four-time Stanley Cup champions of the early 1980s.

If there is another, let’s hope she’s not Rebecca Peca.

Trivia time: Name the only former major leaguer to have pitched 500 innings and given up more walks than hits.

Garden stating: New Jersey’s hockey Devils and basketball Nets share an arena, but don’t bother asking the NBA team’s members what they know about hockey.

Kenyon Martin, Richard Jefferson, Lucious Harris and Coach Byron Scott told Associated Press they’d never been to a hockey game.

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Harris was proud to correctly guess the number of periods in a hockey game, three, and Jefferson scored points by correctly pronouncing goalkeeper Martin Brodeur’s name -- MAHR-tan broh-DOOR.

As for Scott, he said what he needed to know about New Jersey didn’t include hockey.

“All I need to know is coming down 280 to the Jersey ‘Pike to the office and the arena is always a pretty good trip,” he said.

“And I love ‘The Sopranos.’ ”

Taxing situation: Washington Post columnist Sally Jenkins has a plan to rid us of greedy universities that have “forgotten to even feign an interest in sports-as-education and no longer bother to hide their real underlying motive: profit.”

Tax them.

“Tax them, and put a few more dollars in the pockets of parents so they can send their kids to good schools,” she wrote.

Jenkins interviewed economist Andrew Zimbalist, who compared the Atlantic Coast Conference’s attempt to steal three schools from the Big East to a “hostile takeover.”

Trivia answer: Mitch “Wild Thing” Williams, 544 walks and 537 hits in 691 1/3 innings.

And finally: In a recent appearance on the “Tonight Show,” Mighty Duck goalie Jean-Sebastien Giguere was asked how he became a goalie.

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“I was the youngest of five in my family, and they always put the youngest kid in the net because he can’t complain,” Giguere said. “So I’d go in there and everybody would shoot at my head.”

Sounds a little like how Goldberg started out in the movie.

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