They Shoot. They Score.

The NHL held its second New Year's Winter Classic outdoor game in as many years yesterday. The Detroit Red Wings defeated the Chicago Blackhawks 6-4 in front of more that 40,000 fans at Wrigley Field.

Talk about an event going off without a hitch! Everything about the game was just about perfect. All of the decisions the league had control over (the teams involved, the venue) turned out to be right on the dot, and the things that no one has any control over (i.e., the weather) cooperated as well. By all accounts the ice conditions were excellent, and the absence of any snow on the rink (picturesque as it was last year) permitted the pace of play to be much higher than it was during the last Winter Classic in Buffalo. Scoring was commensurately higher--let's face it, ten goals is better than two, when it comes to holding the interest of the casual fan. Could even a player as gifted as Pavel Datsyuk have produced a goal quite this beautiful in last year's ice conditions? Almost certainly not.

Perhaps it's just the afterglow of the event's success, but I no longer have any reservations about making this an annual event, as I did last year. The Winter Classic represents an opportunity for the sport of ice hockey to step up and genuinely be in the spotlight for one day a year. (And yes, I do think it is possibly to effectively compete with that traditional sporting occupant of New Year's Day, college football...certainly as long as the NCAA adheres to its current, absurd method of determining a champion, which dooms all New Year's bowl games to being meaningless exhibitions). The fact that its occurrence on the calendar (provided it is always held on New Year's, as it should be) is set far in advance will allow people to plan events around it, as they do for the Super Bowl. I had a few friends over for last year's game and a few more over for this year's game, and I hope to make it an annual tradition.

With the fatalism of a long-time NHL fan, of course, my thoughts immediately turn to an obvious question: How will the league screw this up? Certainly the very worst move the NHL could make would be to stage some sort of exhibition game--such as the NHL All-Star Game--as its annual outdoor event, rather than a meaningful regular-season game. As I've mentioned in this space before, the All-Star Game is inevitably an intrinsically flawed event, and in my opinion ought to be phased for something better, anyway. (Both this year and last year, non-hockey fans have asked me, with respect to the Winter Classic, "Does this game count?" When I respond in the affirmative, their interest level immediately goes up...you can see it in their faces.)

I've heard some talk from some quarters about doing precisely what I opposed in the last paragraph, but as near as I can tell there is no movement in the league's front offices for any such thing. More worrisome to me is the potential for the game to be staged someplace that doesn't have genuine, honest-to-goodness winter on 1 January...such as Ross McKeon's suggestion, in the sidebar to this article, that an outdoor game be played in Las Vegas. "No doubt, the players and fans would enjoy the Sin City setting," McKeon writes.

Um...sorry, wrong. I am in general a big advocate of Sun Belt hockey (I root for a team from California, for crying out loud) and I don't have an ideological opposition to playing hockey in climates with no natural ice, as do some hockey fundamentalists. But much like a Green Bay Packers game from Lambeau Field in December, the aesthetic that comes with the "Winter" part of the Winter Classic provides much of the appeal, especially for the casual fan. As much as the snow mucked up play in Buffalo last year, it was unquestionably positive from an aesthetic point of view. So places like Boston, New York, Montreal, and (ahem) the Twin Cities of Minneapolis-St. Paul should all be candidates for the next several years. Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Tampa Bay? Not so much. Maybe, if the event truly becomes well-established over the next decade or so...maybe then you consider putting it someplace warm, just to mix things up a bit. Until then, though, let's keep it cold.