Qui-Gon Nolan, Faulkner, Bossy

Because my son is such a huge Star Wars fan and because I loves the Interweb, check out this list of all 30 NHL coaches with the Star Wars character they most closely resemble, courtesy of Puck that Hit, via SI.com.

Our own Ted Nolan is likened to Qui-Gon Jinn, Jedi Knight and Obi-Wan's mentor. Can't argue with that one. I also loved the characters assigned to Tom Renney, Jacques Martin, Wayne Gretzky, John Tortorella and, of course, Scotty Bowman.

And for the literate, check out William Faulkner's description of his first hockey game, courtesy of the Sports Illustrated Vault, which has made available, for free, every article ever written for the magazine. Now THAT'S what the Internet is all about. That, and YouTube.

IslandersArmy has a link to an NHL.com story on Chris Pronger and how he idolized Mike Bossy as a youth, while wondering how Pronger turned out the way he did. Good stuff.

It reminded me of my younger brother, Joe, who idolized Bossy as a kid — so much so that if the Islanders won but Bossy didn't score, he was disappointed.

How spoiled we all were.

By the way, what's your earliest sports memory and how young were you? For me, it was the fall of 1975, when I was 6 years old. I clearly recall playing baseball in the street and thinking that the Mets were in third place and that wasn't that bad. Little did I know I'd be in for 8 years of misery (until the Keith Hernandez trade turned things around).

Anyway, let's figure that the average sports fan's first sports memories start at age 5 — a nice, round number. That means in order to remember the Islanders winning the Stanley Cup in 1983, a person would have to have been 5, or born in 1978.

Which means if you're younger than 30, you have no memory of the Islanders winning the Cup. Which means there are fans out there with jobs and kids and mortgages who have lived their entire lives not knowing the joy of seeing the Islanders winning a championship.

THAT is sobering.