This is not a Next Play. Next Play is a live event and is this is being written at least one day before the great misfortune its reception by you, our only reader. As indicated in the notes of last week, we are on assignment. Nonetheless:
Next Play hereby and without reserve nor hint of irony nor bureaucratic impropriety nor indeed any notion of those common insincerities so prevalent among a great number of lesser Substacks (ex. Temple Fainshaw’s noxious I am Faster at Rubik’s Cube Than You Are, surely unworthy of more than one paragraph much less a daily 10,000 words!) fulfills its obligations to the people of Winnipeg (or Winnipagios) and offers an unequivocal, uncategorical and indeed uncharacterizable apology for withholding in last week’s otherwise brilliant column, from the list of Canadian teams in the playoffs, this year’s President’s (Choice) Trophy winners, the Winnipeg Jets, who are now up on St. Louis two games to one after enduring last night a thorough manhandling by the Blues, whyever they may be called that.
Next Play has often been overheard, quite drunk at otherwise tepid cocktail gatherings, expounding, impounding and simply pounding that the team that should have the name Blues is the one from Ottawa, a city which enjoys and/or despairs under a vibrant blues scene, even hosting an annual festival cleverly monikered The Ottawa Blues Festival. The Ottawa Blues would be a qualitative improvement upon the Ottawa Senators, with its invocation of a semi-retired, semi-drunk Canadian on a breathing apparatus. How a semi-drunk can perform sober second thought begs the question.
But back to Winnipeg (a refrain not commonly voiced by expats in Toronto). As a result of our colossal error, Next Play has undergone a significant restructuring, and we are happy to report that copyediting services are being friend-shored to a 9-year-old Manitoban farmer with an aptitude for math. Because if there are five Canadian teams in the playoffs, and you have written four names, then you are short one. It seems basic, looking at it from now, but Next Play is an enormous operation, and oversight is more frequently undersight.
Which concludes this editorial correction, in the best tradition of newspapers which most Canadians don’t even know exist anymore.
For more great Winnipeg stuff besides their remarkable hockey team, Next Play encourages a rewatch of Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg and do yourself a favour and check out Universal Language, a movie about Winnipeg in the style of an Iranian film (you can’t make this stuff up). It is, quite sincerely, fucking hilarious.
BLUEBOMBS
· Take a minute for a good man down.
· Jet! Woohoohoohooohoohoo