Happy 1st Birthday, RBH!!!

Today is the first birthday of Red and Black Hockey. A year ago today, I decided to stop boring the two readers of my other blog with all the talk about hockey, and do the right thing by setting up shop at RBH. The road was tough to hoe at the beginning, and I knew that a spin-off from a blog that only had two readers wasn't a great idea, but I wanted and needed to write about hockey. In the beginning, I had one reader. One. You know who you are.
This community has been very supportive, though, and as the weeks and months wore on, and every day to my amazement, I was getting more and more readers. Some, astonishingly, became regular readers. Now, I'm no VCOE, by any stretch of the imagination, but it makes me proud that I've managed to amass 42,900 hits in my first year. To be honest, that's about 42,875 more than I thought I would get.
Thanks to the support of the many bloggers who have inspired me, the many who have given me links, and of course to my Stanley Cup winning Carolina Hurricanes. Without any of that, I might have given up the ghost.

Thanks for a great year. I hope you keep coming back.

<<We interrupt this blog post for a special announcement>>

And while I celebrate myself, the horrific events in the "real world" today remind me that while we can watch hockey and go to the movies and blog about stuff in order to escape from the "real world", we are very fortunate to even have that luxury. I'll try not to forget that.

<<We now join the regularly scheduled blog post, already in progress>>

Once again, please note the countdown to opening night at the top of the page.