from Mark Lazerus of the Chicagto Sun-Times,

“You [expletive] ogre! Go back to your swamp! Go back to your swamp, you [expletive] ogre!” Hartman hollered, a smile creeping across his face.

Reaves, who has spent several hundred minutes in penalty boxes and has heard just about everything, could only laugh and spit out some nonsense. Something colorful, to be sure.

“I don’t have planned chirps,” Reaves, now with the Penguins, said a year later. “I’m off the top of my head. I like to keep it new, keep it fresh. I’m talkative in there. I can’t tell you my chirps because they come to me right away. But they’re good. If you had me miked up for a year, you’d have some good material. I don’t know if you’d be able to play a lot of it, though. You’d have to put it on HBO late at night.”

A standard penalty box is about 8 feet wide, with a simple flat bench on which to sit. It’s surrounded on three sides by glass — to protect penalized players and the penalty-box attendants from stray pucks in front of them and drunken fans behind them. But at many NHL rinks, there’s no glass in between the boxes, just two sets of boards.

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