“A clarion call should go out to the league and to hockey players everywhere, that

Buffalo is hockey heaven.” – Ted Black, February 22, 2011

Those words will be difficult to forget. It marked the start of what was expected to be a long, happy relationship between the Buffalo Sabres and their fans. However, just over two years later things aren’t as rosy as they were on Pegula Day.

Give Terry Pegula and his management team credit, they took strides towards improving things on and off the ice. They renovated the locker room, upgraded the concourses and introduced numerous new features throughout the arena in an effort to make First Niagara Center a hockey mecca. The under construction HARBORcenter project proves just that. Pegula even gave the go-ahead to empty the Brinks truck in free agency as the Sabres went out and snagged a pair of the most sought after free agents in the 2011 crop.

This Buffalo hockey team is insufferable. They can’t seem to get out of their own way at times, but they still have the ability to win games. Even when they’re booed. This team has looked cooked so many times throughout the season, yet they haven’t made the precipitous fall to the very bottom of the league on their way to a high draft pick.

At the same time, the Sabres find themselves in playoff limbo, just four points and three teams out of a playoff spot with nine games to play. Four of those nine remaining games are against teams directly above them in the standings (Winnipeg and the two New York teams), and six are at home. Are they primed for another late-season push into the playoffs? Is that the best option?

About a year ago, the drunks boys over at Dear God, Why Us? Sports planned one of their occupy Nassau trips to see the Sabres battle the Islanders. At the time, the Sabres had just come off that January road trip from hell. So we didn't go into the game feeling particularly good about them.

At one point, some of us in the group started to heckle Ryan Miller. I have absolutely no idea what brought this on. I think he let in a soft goal or we just decided to be dicks. Booze was probably involved. A few of us started with the sarcastic "Miller" chant. Four of us became 6 of us, 6 of us became about 10 of us, 10 of us became about 3 rows of us. Yes, between the 10 of us becoming 3 rows of us booing, I decided to join the fray in a "monkey see, monkey do" type of way.

All of a sudden, one of the people in our party got up, turned toward us and gave us the business. He was not happy with us. He pointed very angrily at the group who started the chant and said we should not boo our own team, especially Miller. We all stopped and realized it was pretty stupid for us to do that. It was just a quick, impulsive thing to do. It wasn't predetermined, it was like a gut reaction. In the end, we all hugged it out, and  I figured we still liked Miller, obviously, and were just being dicks. We were just heckling to heckle.

It seems like such a cliché to start something about Jason Pominville with Game 5 of the Ottawa series in the 2006 playoffs.  But really where else can something about Jason Pominville begin?  There are very few people in Buffalo who can’t vividly recall Pominville skating around Daniel Alfredsson, Jay McKee flying out of the penalty box, and Rick Jeanneret bellowing his now classic, “NOW DO YOU BELIEVE?  NOW DO YOU BELIEVE?  THESE GUYS ARE GOOD!  SCARY GOOD!”  I leapt off the couch, jumped up and down and screamed, “HOLY SHIT, THIS IS SO AWESOME!”  I moved to Buffalo in the summer of 2000 so that was the first great moment of my Sabres fandom, the first moment that really swept me away.

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There have obviously been way more lows than highs under Terry Pegula's ownership. Who would have thought that two years ago? All the dreams we had about money changing the trajectory of this team for the better was nothing more than treachery.

We get our legendary coach fired and the team seems to be on the cusp of making another heroic run to 10th place for the 3rd straight season. It has been a big pile of compost for the two years for the most part.

However, I'd be remised to not mention there have been some brighter spots during the Pegula reign. There's Pegula day, the time they clinched the playoffs against the Flyers in 2011, Leino/Ehrhoff deals, and the Robyn Regehr watch.

The RR watch is what I'd like to focus on.