For the first time in eons, the city that was once the heart of hockey (with Montreal being the soul) was back in the Stanley Cup playoff picture. All told, it was good for the franchise, good for the fans, and good for the city. Hell, it was good for hockey...

I'm scheduled to golf tomorrow. First round of the season. Be prepared: you may need an umbrella. Or, if history repeats, you may have to skate to work. Around fallen trees and downed hydro wires. In this, the spring of 2013, it's all just par for the course.

At some point during Major League Baseball's Opening Week -- in the fog of having watched more games than I can clearly recall, or care to admit -- I became wildly jealous of the denizens of the diamond's dugouts, and not solely because they're placed on a pedestal, pampered and obscenely overpaid.

It's Opening Day in Toronto. All of which is to say that as of around 7 p.m., when 125-million-dollars-worth of terrific talent takes the field for the home side at the Rogers Centre, and knuckleballer R.A. Dickey lets fly (or lets float) that first pitch -- we will be finally able to utter those three beautiful words: Baseball Is Back.

Time to prep your picks and get your brackets in order. Time to say goodbye to reality and to enter a parallel universe. Yes kids, the 2013 National Collegiate Athletic Association Basketball Championship, a.k.a. March Madness, tips-off Tuesday, March 19 in Dayton, Ohio. But how you will ever manage to cram an estimated 160 hours of basketball into your tight schedule?

It seems that March Madness has come early this year. Honestly, less than a week into the month -- and still two weeks shy of the U.S. college basketb...

As Dwyane Wade explained, in what seems to some to be an utterance of unfathomable understatement: LeBron James is "off the planet right now. He's not...

To football fanatics, the two-week time lag between Conference Championship Sunday and Super Bowl Sunday is more than a little dry spell sans their pigskin pastime, it's a veritable desert in the oasis of National Football League action and entertainment.

Every year on the Monday after the last Sunday of the regular season, the NFL unofficially holds its annual (seemingly drunken) firing fest as the wise people who hired all these apparently inept people in the first place, conclude at once not that they made horrible hiring decisions. And yet, oddly enough, the league seems to do little to capitalize on all this inherent drama.

In an irony as ripe as weird Uncle Willard's bedside denture jar and nuttier than old Auntie Jean's inedible fruitcake, there are whispers that the National Hockey League and its players union are inching toward an agreement to truncate their age-old lockout, and allow a new season to finally begin... right around the time the world is scheduled to end.

It seems more than a bit odd that, according to a probing piece in The New York Times, players do not protect those delicate, tender, highly sought-after jewels. Seriously, though: no cups? That's astonishing. I mean, they wear equipment to protect every other area. Why be more protective of the kidneys than the cookies? More protective of the noggin than the nuggets?

In an age where The Big F (ah, that's Fun) is seemingly being siphoned out of sports by avarice and idiocy and egos, it's nice to hear the down-home story of the Hembry and Babbitt boys of Emerson, Iowa (population 430), young (and not-so-young) men determined to put The Big F back into sport.

What happens when three excited children, one grandmother and two mamas/aunties go shopping together, manoeuvring a crowded mini-van through a torrential down-pour? Santa could at the very least provide a few of his slacker elves for babysitting service and maybe a reindeer or two for entertainment. Needless to say, online shopping is looking pretty good this year.