“My shot wouldn’t break through a wet paper bag.”

Minnesota Wild winger Mark Parrish, astounded that he could break a bone in Chris Pronger’s foot.

“Honestly, I miss [Vancouver]. As much as maybe sometimes you don’t miss the attention, I do miss the fact people here care so much about the game, and what you do is so important to them.”

Florida Panther goalie Alex Auld comments on his time in Vancouver during last weekend’s visit to the city with his new team.

“If I’m working at Royal Bank and I don’t eat enough today or don’t have the right mix of foods in my diet, I’m going to be sluggish. I’m going to be lethargic, but maybe no one at work is going to notice.

But here, if you’re sluggish and lethargic, a red light is going to go on and people are going to boo and throw things at you.”

Matt Nichol, the Toronto Maple Leafs’ strength and conditioning co-ordinator, tries to keep the boys in blue in healthy form. (Can’t stop us from throwing things, however.)

“I was just really happy to get a chance to play and help the team win. That’s the bottom line. I’ve dreamed my whole life of getting a chance to play every day in this league, and I got that the last 21 games or so. I loved it.’‘

Nashville’s Chris Mason had a blast being #1 in net for the Predators while Tomas Vokoun recently recovered from injury.

”[You] feel like you want to stay in and hopefully you’re going to make some saves and all of a sudden there is next power play and you give up next goal. So it was like, OK, seven it’s enough, I have to stop something, and they score on next shot.”

Wings’ goalie Dominik Hasek explaining how things can escalate from bad to worse. He stayed in the game till Chris Osgood took over with only 8:22 in the game. That night Hasek allowed 8 goals for the first time in his NHL career.

Now that he’s retired, Joe Nieuwendyk has plenty of time to fish down in Florida, but he almost threw out his already achy back trying to land a real whopper a while back. He hooked an alligator, by mistake, in his backyard pond.

“The thing came up and showed its teeth,” said Niewendyk’s buddy, Gary Roberts. “He dropped his rod and the gator unhooked himself.” Roberts knows all about gators. He saw an eight-footer sunning himself behind his house one day.

Alligator tales from the Edmonton Journal

“Now, like I try to tell the guys, if someone hits you, you always try to get up, no matter what. If someone hits you and you stay down, that makes the whole team celebrate. But if they see you pop right back up, it makes them think, ‘How am I going to make him stay down?’”

High school player Jamie Neitring speaks eloquently about what it means to take your hits and keep getting back up. Words of wisdom for us all, I figure.

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*Sorry this is a day late—I seem to have some mutant version of influenza and it’s doing its very best to kill me…