You think you know (CT), but you haven't got a clue

A 6-2 Hamilton win leaves the Bulldogs 60 minutes away from their first Calder Cup. Eric Manlow scored a goal and an assist and was second star. Game 5 is Thursday.

Congrats to Darien's Ryan Shannon, who'll get his name on the Cup with the flighty Ducks. And clutch job for Darien by NBC, which cut back to the Cup just in time to catch his moment with it aloft. (I normally complain about networks cutting away from the Cup for stand-up interviews, but that one with Selanne was by far the best one yet. Usually, you're cutting away from actual emotion to talk about emotion with guys who are still numb; this interview was serious emotion all over his face.)

Tip o'cap to correspondent Bob Farrington, who passed on the Okposo staying in school release at the Gophers' site.

ATL: Craig Berube is again coach of the Phantoms. Eurohockey notes that Bryce Lampman signed with TPS Turku (link in Finnish). It also notes that ol' buddy Dusan Salficky is off to Nizhny Novgorod, that brief Sound Tiger Steve Crampton is off to Germany (German), that Isles draft pick Robin Figren was picked up by the Edmonton Oil Kings in the WHL expansion draft (Canadian English), and -- zut alors! -- that former Nighthawk John Miner is moving from Denmark to France. (Fun with Babelfish: "It (Miner) flew away to Europe which it has furrowed for 16 years with success.")

Combining the last two parts of that, Brent Raedeke's name caught my eye on the Edmonton list. Couldn't find out if he's related to former Nighthawk Mark, but they're both from Regina. But in looking: Red Deer drafted Craig Redmond's kid. (Craig Redmond only played five games in New Haven? Yeesh, did I see them all?)

Didn't actually make it to Willimantic; turns out Eastern Connecticut's athletic facilities are technically in Mansfield (glad I asked). When I went to Lime Rock, I found it hard to believe you could drive for an hour and a half and still be in Connecticut. Know better now: You can drive for an hour and a half and still be in the middle of the state. I always like driving through towns -- or at least seeing signs for towns -- I've never seen. Bolton, Columbia, Marlborough, Hebron: they were dots on a map, or parts of regional high schools and co-op hockey teams. I see Route 66 cutting through some of these small towns and imagine a trail cut through a forest, no matter how much I know it's not true, and that the center of East Hampton looks just a little like Route 34 at the Derby/Orange border.

I don't know why that particularly excites me, but hey.

Had never seen this before, but ECSU had one in the baseball press box: looks like a ladder, but with alternating steps...

Have a fair chance in the next two nights of covering the softball champions of each of our four big conferences. Now if only those winners were all in the same CIAC class, we could play 'em off for the Connecticut Post Cup or something...

Randomly: Fun (well, not for the victims) with unintended consequences from the Freakonomics folks. China suppresses Tiananmen Square so well that references fly over people's heads.