Party Time In Chicago!

It was a BIG day in the Windy City yesterday, by all accounts.  Here's a piece part of one of 'em (you should read the whole thing, it's fun!) ...

At the corner of Washington and Canal is where I set up camp, in the thick of screaming Blackhawks fans. 

Of course, delirious fans and sunny-day partiers and bicycle messengers and foreign tourists and office workers and suburban kids blowing off caddying jobs lined the parade route like ants on a watermelon spill. 

Thousands of people. Hundreds of thousands. A million.

Two million, some reports say.

[...]

And at last appeared the cherries on top, perhaps the two most charismatic yet dissimilar child-star hockey players in any recent Cup winners -- 22-year-old "Captain Serious" Jonathan Toews and 21-year old ice-magician/party monster Patrick Kane.

Toews stood on the left of the bus top, smiling and waving. Kane stood on the right, screaming like a lunatic, doing repeated military presses with the 35-pound Stanley Cup.

The NHL will entrust this treasured trophy to this guy? 

To his Buffalo pals? To whatever bimbos might fall in and barely resurface? 

Oh, what a lovely thing the sport of hockey is! What a culture. What a hoot. 

Yeah... and what a party!  Dee-troit does it up in similar fashion when The Cup comes home.  Chicago is a much bigger city than Detroit, so I'll give 'em their two million parade attendance over our 1.4 million.  But that's a lot of fans for a supposedly "minor" sport, innit?  I'm thinkin' it would have been GREAT good fun to be bar hoppin' in Chicago last night.

As far as trusting Kane with The Cup goes... Hell, the NHL entrusted Darren McCarty with the chalice back in his party-hearty days.  I'm sure Kane can't do worse.  Or better, as the case might be.  (Insert big-ass grin here)