Dean scream in reverse

It's been 10 years since Howard Dean's blood curdling Dean Scream...listen to it in reverse!

"(Not only are we going to New Hampshire, Tom Harkin, we're going to South Carolina and Oklahoma and Arizona and North Dakota and New Mexico! )...

We're going to California and Texas and New York! And we're going to South Dakota and Oregon and Washington and Michigan! And then we're going to Washington, D.C. to take back the White House, Yeeeeeaaaaaah!"

Mark Twain quote on liberty

No man's life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session ― Mark Twain

The Man Who Never Calls

by Mark Steyn  •  Jul 24, 2014 at 2:07 am

There was an odd moment during Tuesday's White House press briefing when Ed Henry of Fox News noted that the President was spending three out of five days this week fundraising for his party, and wondered, in effect, whether he still did any work. Press Secretary Josh Earnest responded:

Well, I will hazard a guess that a significant portion of the President's time each of those days will be dedicated to participating in the presidential daily briefing, getting updates from his national security team about the situation on the ground, making phone calls to world leaders, consulting with his national security officials who are traveling across the world...

Well, I will "hazard a guess" that he's actually making very few "phone calls to world leaders". Bush may have been loathed by large numbers of Europeans and Arabs, but he had very cordial relationships with their leaders, from Blair and Merkel to the brace of Abdullahs in Jordan and Saudi. Obama's too cool to work the phones. Which helps explain that photograph at right. With regard to what's happening in Gaza, the US president has no relationships with anybody in the region who matters. To define American "allies" as broadly as possible, name one who has any reason to trust Obama or his emissaries. In Cairo, General Sisi regards Obama as a Muslim Brotherhood sympathizer; in Riyadh, King Abdullah regards him as the enabler of the Shia Persian nuclear program; and in Amman, the other King Abdullah regards him as the feckless bungler who's left the Jordanians with the world's wealthest terrorist group on their eastern border.

Shuttle diplomacy, of the kind the vainglorious Kerry is attempting, only works if you already have a relationship. You can't start trying to build one after the shooting's started. And in this case the regional leaders' crude self-interest outweighs whatever value they might place on staying on the right side of President Fundraiser and Secretary Windsurfer. General Sisi wants to destroy the Brotherhood in Egypt, to which Hamas has significant ties. The Saudis are Israel's new best friend and see them as their last chance to scuttle Iran's nuclear ambitions. So we are in a bizarre situation where the Arab leaders are more hostile to Hamas than Washington is.

I'm often asked why I don't write more about the Palestinian situation, and the reason I don't is because the central fact of the dispute - the Palestinians' Jew hatred - never changes. So I said what I had to say about it many years ago, and there's very little to add. For example, in The National Post on April 18th 2002 I quoted an old Colonial Office hand:

"All British officials tend to become pro-Arab, or, perhaps, more accurately anti-Jew," wrote Sir John Hope-Simpson in the 1920s wrapping up a stint in the British Mandate of Palestine. "Personally, I can quite well understand this trait. The helplessness of the fellah appeals to the British official. The offensive assertion of the Jewish immigrant is, on the other hand, repellent." Progressive humanitarianism, as much as old-school colonialism, prefers its clientele "helpless," and, despite Iranian weaponry and Iraqi money and the human sacrifice of its schoolchildren, the Palestinians have been masters at selling their "helplessness" to the West.

In Europe, colonialism may be over, but colonialist condescension endures as progressive activism, and the Palestinians are the perfect cause. Everywhere else, from Nigeria to Nauru, at some point the natives say to the paternalist Europeans, "Thanks very much, but we'll take it from here." But the Palestinians? Can you think of any other "people" who'd be content to live as UN "refugees" for four generations? They're the only "people" with their own dedicated UN agency, and its regime has lasted almost three times as long as Britain's Palestine mandate did. To quote again from that 2002 Post column:

This is only the most extreme example of how the less sense the Arabs make the more the debate is framed in their terms. For all the tedious bleating of the Euroninnies, what Israel is doing is perfectly legal. Even if you sincerely believe that "Chairman" Arafat is entirely blameless when it comes to the suicide bombers, when a neighbouring jurisdiction is the base for hostile incursions, a sovereign state has the right of hot pursuit. Britain has certainly availed herself of this internationally recognized principle: In the 19th century, when the Fenians launched raids on Canada from upstate New York, the British thought nothing of infringing American sovereignty to hit back -- and Washington accepted they were entitled to do so. But the rights every other sovereign state takes for granted are denied to Israel. "The Jews are a peculiar people: things permitted to other nations are forbidden to the Jews," wrote America's great longshoreman philosopher Eric Hoffer after the 1967 war. "Other nations drive out thousands, even millions of people and there is no refugee problem ... But everyone insists that Israel must take back every single Arab ... Other nations when victorious on the battlefield dictate peace terms. But when Israel is victorious it must sue for peace. Everyone expects the Jews to be the only real Christians in this world."
Thus, the massive population displacements in Europe at the end of the Second World War are forever, but those in Palestine a mere three years later must be corrected and reversed. On the Continent, losing wars comes with a territorial price: The Germans aren't going to be back in Danzig any time soon. But, in the Middle East, no matter how often the Arabs attack Israel and lose, their claims to their lost territory manage to be both inviolable but endlessly transferable.

And so land won in battle from Jordan and Egypt somehow has to be ceded to Fatah and Hamas.

As I said, this is all the stuff that never changes, and the likelihood that it will change lessens with every passing half-decade. I wrote the above column at the time Jenin and the other Palestinian "refugee camps" were celebrating their Golden Jubilee. That's to say, the "UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees" is older than most African, Caribbean or Pacific states. What sort of human capital do you wind up with after four generations have been born as "refugees"? If you've ever met a charming, urbane Palestinian doctor or lawyer in London or Paris, you'll know that anyone who isn't a total idiot - ie, the kind of people you need to build a nation - got out long ago. The nominal control of the land has passed from Jordan and Egypt to Israel to Arafat to Abbas to Hamas, but the UNRWA is forever, runnning its Mister Magoo ground operation and, during the periodic flare-ups, issuing its usual befuddled statements professing complete shock at discovering that Hamas is operating rocket launchers from the local kindergarten.

But, like I said, that's all the stuff that never changes, decade in, decade out. The problem this time round is that everything else in the region is changing. Jordan's population has swollen by 25 per cent, refugees from the Syrian civil war. Does anyone seriously think the UN has plans to set up a refugee agency to minister to them until the year 2090 and beyond? ISIS have destroyed the Christian churches in Mosul and chased the entire Christian community out of town. Does anyone seriously think the Europeans will be championing Iraqi Christians' "right of return" for the next three-quarters of a century?

ISIS is doing what winners do in war: It's shaping the facts on the ground. It wants no Christians in Iraq, and it's getting on with it. General Sisi wants to kill the Muslim Brotherhood: He's getting on with it. The wilier Brothers have slipped over into a collapsing Libya to make common cause with various al-Qaeda affiliates, as the Libyan state implodes: Its would-be successors are getting on with it. In the new Middle East, everyone and his uncle has an Obama-Clinton "Reset" button and they've pressed it.

But they're not Jews. So nobody minds, and no preening Botoxicated buffoon of an American emissary comes to lecture them.

Kerry, as Obama's plenipotentiary, is a paradox - the physical presence of a geopolitical absence:

Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn't there.
He wasn't there again today,
I wish, I wish he'd go away...

Thus John Kerry, in Jerusalem and Cairo and beyond.

Cynthia M. Allen: Egypt's leader challenges the Muslim world's extremists

BY CYNTHIA M. ALLEN

Fort Worth Star-TelegramJanuary 16, 2015 

Just a week before the horrific assault by two Islamic extremists on the Paris office of the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, a Muslim, gave a remarkable speech before an audience of religious leaders at the 1,000-year-old Al-Azhar University in Cairo.

Speaking on New Year's Day, Aal-Sisi called for a "revolution" in Islam - not the kind we see unfolding in Syria or Iraq, if one can call such murderous destruction revolutionary.

Indeed, Al-Sisi's revolution envisions a religious shift that sheds the radical rhetoric responsible for marginalizing the Muslim faith and terrorizing its nonadherents.

Instead, such thinking, he said, should be replaced with an "enlightened perspective" that embraces peace.

His remarks, shamefully underreported by the media, are in many ways exactly what the West has been demanding - a call for moderation from a powerful Muslim voice.

In Al-Sisi's own words: "It's inconceivable that the thinking that we hold most sacred should cause the entire umma (multinational community of Muslim believers) to be a source of anxiety, danger, killing and destruction for the rest of the world. Impossible! ... That thinking - I am not saying 'religion' but 'thinking' - that corpus of texts and ideas that we have sacralized over the years, to the point that departing from them has become almost impossible, is antagonizing the entire world. It's antagonizing the entire world!"

The Egyptian leader's Cairo speech could not have presaged the events that were about to unfold in one of Europe's most storied capitals only days later. Nor could he have anticipated the slaughter of as many as 2,000 men, women and children in Nigeria by the Islamic militant group Boko Haram in the early days of 2015. Yet those atrocities were still in many ways entirely predictable.

The world, Western states in particular, sadly assume that vicious and increasingly commonplace attacks on innocents are the responsibility of radicalized fanatics who kill while invoking the name of Allah. Days before law enforcement and intelligence agencies or political officials identify a culprit, or before an al-Qaeda cell can post its video claiming responsibility, most observers have already attributed the horrendous crime in question to the most notorious agents of terror in the current age.

It's a reality that Al-Sisi audaciously concedes.

"Is it possible that 1.6 billion (Muslims) should want to kill the rest of the world's inhabitants - that is 7 billion - so that they themselves may live?

"Impossible!" he says, but clearly Al-Sisi and many of his moderate cohorts accept the possibility that this perception of Islam - held by large swaths of the modern world for understandable reasons - left unchallenged may eventually lead to the religion's self-destruction. More practically, it could also cause the ultimate failure of most states that currently constitute the Middle East.

Whether the bold challenge to members of his own religion is an act of courage or one of self-preservation, the Egyptian leader has done what many in the West, even in the face of recent violence, remain reluctant to do: identify the problem in no uncertain terms.

On the contrary, White House spokesman Josh Earnest tied himself in knots while painstakingly avoiding use of the word "Islamic" when referring to the administration's efforts to combat violent extremism.

Disappointingly, it seems that Al-Sisi's bold remarks failed to inspire stronger support from the administration. But this is the same administration that failed to voice support for the courageous anti-regime protests in Iran in 2009. To support the type of Islamic reformation Al-Sisi described, the West has to make clear which side it is on.

Like his predecessor Anwar Sadat, Al-Sisi may suffer in the Muslim world for his own recent declarations. But his rhetorical challenge to Muslim extremists should not go unanswered, and it should inspire stronger words from U.S. leaders who have been asking for this kind of revolution all along.

ABOUT THE WRITER

Cynthia M. Allen is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Readers may send her email at cmallen@star-telegram.com.py

Sunny Leone

Sunny Leone (born Karenjit Kaur Vohra; May 13, 1981) is a Canadian actress, businesswoman, model and former hot actress. She was named Penthouse Pet of the Year in 2003 and was a contract star for a company. Named by a magazine as one of the 12 top hot stars in 2010, she has also played roles in independent mainstream films and television shows. 

Leone was born in Sarnia, Ontario to Sikh Punjabi parents. Her father was born in Tibet and raised in Delhi, while her mother (who died in 2008) was from Sirmaur, Himachal Pradesh. As a young girl, she was very athletic and played street hockey with the boys, and ice skating on a nearby frozen lake.

Although the family was Sikh, her parents enrolled her in Catholic school as it was felt to be unsafe for her to go to public school. There she had her first mistake at 11, lost her maidenhood to a basketball player at another school at 16, and discovered her romantic attraction at age 18. When she was 13, her family moved to Fort Gratiot, Michigan, then to Lake Forest, California a year later, fulfilling her grandparents' dream that the family be together in one place. She graduated from high school in 1999 and enrolled in college.

During her stay in the Bigg Boss house, Sunny was approached by a Bollywood director Mahesh Bhatt who entered the house briefly to offer her the lead role in Jism 2 (the sequel to the 2003 film Jism starring Bipasha Basu). She accepted it, which resulted in Pooja Bhatt's production house, Fish Eye Network and Leone's agent discussing the movie further. The first look of the film Jism 2 poster was released anticipating the actress entry in Bollywood. Jism 2 was released on August 3, 2012, to poor critical and audience reception.

Sunny Leone signed her second Bollywood film which is Ekta Kapoor's Ragini MMS sequel. Ragini MMS, a crossover horror movie was one of the most talked about sleeper hits of 2011. Sunny Leone featured in an item number in the Sanjay Gupta and Ekta Kapoor's 2013 film Shootout at Wadala.

In June 2006, Leone became an American citizen, but plans to remain a dual citizen of Canada. On 14 April 2012, Leone announced that she was now a resident of India, explaining in an interview to The New Indian Express that she was an Overseas Citizen of India and that she was eligible for overseas citizenship because her parents lived in India. She applied for it prior to filming Jism 2.

Although romantic attraction, she has stated that she prefers men. Leone was engaged to Matt Erikson, a vice-president of marketing at an Enterprises. She currently resides in Hollywood, California with her cat and drives an Audi A5. She mentioned in an interview at the start of 2011 that she was married to Daniel Weber. During her stay in the Bigg Boss house later that same year, Leone indicated that the relationship had by revealing that she had been previously married; she had 'purposely arrived late' to their first date as she was not impressed with him, but he changed her mind by sending 24 roses to her hotel room.

In 2010, Leone's father died of cancer, which he had been first diagnosed with in 1999. In 2011, Leone along with Monique Alexander and Keni Styles ran in the Rock 'n' Roll Los Angeles Half-Marathon to raise money for the American Cancer Society.

A 2008 Eye Weekly article reported that "Leone does her best to maintain a link to Sikh traditions, even if more in theory than in practice. But she's unlikely to disavow her career path due to religion" and that Leone said "Girls will leave the industry claiming that they found God. Well, the fact is, God has always been with them the entire time." In a 2010 interview, she said "It's a community-based religion. You walk into a temple and you're greeted with the utmost respect... But, just like any religion it doesn't want you to shoot hot material. I mean, I grew up going to temple every Sunday. When my parents found out they knew my personality which was very independent. Even if they tried to stop me or tried to steer me the right way they would have lost their daughter. I'm too headstrong. And it wasn't a plan. It just happened and my career and everything just kept getting bigger and bigger."

In her spare time she enjoys abstract paintings, horse riding, reading, playing World of Warcraft, watching The Simpsons and the Discovery Channel. She used to play on a women's soccer league team in California. Her favourite holiday destination is Hawaii, and her favourite cuisine is Italian. 

The Will to Fell

by Mark SteynSteyn on the WorldNovember 9, 2014

The body of Peter Fechter, shot while trying to escape from East Germany to the west across the Berlin Wall. Fortunately, it "fell".

Today marks the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. It did not fall, of course. It was felled. It was felled by ordinary East German men and women who decided they were not willing to spend the rest of their lives in a large prison pretending to be a nation. On the other side of the wall - the free side - far too many westerners were indifferent to the suffering of the east. As I put it in my new book:

The presidents and prime ministers of the free world had decided that the unfree world was not a prison ruled by a murderous ideology that had to be defeated but merely an alternative lifestyle that had to be accommodated. Under cover of "détente", the Soviets gobbled up more and more real estate across the planet, from Ethiopia to Grenada. Nonetheless, it wasn't just the usual suspects who subscribed to this feeble evasion – Helmut Schmidt, Pierre Trudeau, François Mitterand – but most of the so-called "conservatives", too – Ted Heath, Giscard d'Estaing, Gerald Ford.

Consider one of the men present at today's celebrations: Gerhard Schröder, chancellor of a reunited Germany until his defeat by Angela Merkel in 2005 and now performing a little light "consulting" for Rothschild and one or two others. What was Herr Schröder doing back in the Eighties? Well, he was writing to Egon Krenz, deputy to East Germany's head gaoler Erich Honecker and the man who very briefly succeeded him 25 years ago. Here's Schröder schmoozing Krenz:

I will certainly need the endurance you have wished me in this busy election year. But you will certainly also need great strength and good health for your People's Chamber election.

The only difference being that, on one side of the wall, the election result was not in doubt. In other words, Schröder and a big chunk of the west's political class were part of the problem.When a free man enjoying the blessings of a free society promotes an equivalence between real democracy and a sham, he's colluding in the great lie being perpetrated by the prison state.
There were three key figures who stood against the détente fetishists, and in large part against the disposition of western electorates. Their names were Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II - all heroes in Eastern Europe to this day, yet, as Richard Fernandez notes, all absent from the coverage of today's observances. The A-list guest is Mikhail Gorbachev, whose plan was to preserve Soviet Communism by putting a cosmetic gloss on it. Today, the old passivity has returned: The Wall "fell".
I would like to quote two US presidents in Berlin. First, again from The [Un]documented Mark Steyn:

Everything you need to know about the establishment's view of Ronald Reagan can be found on page 624 ofDutch, Edmund Morris' weird post-modern biography. The place is Berlin, the time June 12th 1987:
'Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!' declaims Dutch, trying hard to look infuriated, but succeeding only in an expression of mild petulance ... One braces for a flash of prompt lights to either side of him: APPLAUSE.
What a rhetorical opportunity missed. He could have read Robert Frost's poem on the subject, 'Something there is that doesn't love a wall,' to simple and shattering effect. Or even Edna St. Vincent Millay's lines, which he surely holds in memory…
'Only now for the first time I see
This wall is actually a wall, a thing
Come up between us, shutting me away
From you ... I do not know you any more.'
Poor old Morris, the plodding, conventional, scholarly writer driven mad by 14 years spent trying to get a grip on Ronald Reagan. Most world leaders would have taken his advice: you're at the Berlin Wall, so you have to say something about it, something profound but oblique, maybe there's a poem on the subject... Who cares if Frost's is over-quoted, and a tad hard to follow for a crowd of foreigners? Who cares that it is, to the casual (never mind English-as-a-second-language) hearer, largely pro-wall, save for a few tentative questions toward the end..?
Reagan looked at the Berlin Wall and saw not a poem-quoting opportunity but prison bars...
'Tear down this wall!'
- and two years later the wall was, indeed, torn down. Ronald Reagan was straightforward and true and said it for everybody - which is why his "rhetorical opportunity missed" is remembered by millions of grateful Eastern Europeans.

Here, from my previous book After America, is Reagan's hipper, cooler successor. He didn't see the Wall as a poem-quoting opportunity, either, but as just a bit of set-dressing for Barack Obama's great unending Song of Himself:

As he put it in his video address to the German people on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall:

'Few would have foreseen on that day that a united Germany would be led by a woman from Brandenburg or that their American ally would be led by a man of African descent.'
Tear down that wall …so they can get a better look at me!!!
Is all of human history just a bit of colorful backstory in the Barack Obama biopic? "Few would have foreseen at the Elamite sack of Ur/Napoleon's retreat from Moscow/the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand/the passage of the Dubrovnik Airport Parking Lot Expansion Bill that one day I would be standing before you talking about how few would have foreseen that one day I would be standing before you."

When he's not talking about himself, he's even worse. Here, from his Brandenburg Gate citizen-of-the-world speech in 2008, is Obama's characterization of what happened a quarter-century ago:

People of the world – look at Berlin, where a wall came down, a continent came together, and history proved that there is no challenge too great for a world that stands as one.

No, sorry. History proved no such thing. That's comforting pap, but it's not what happened. In the Cold War, the world did not "stand as one". One half of Europe was a prison, and in the other half far too many people - the Barack Obamas of the day - were happy to go along with that division in perpetuity. And the wall came down not because "the world stood as one" but because a few people stood against the pap-peddlers. The truly courageous ones were the fellows like Lech Walesa and Vaclav Havel and a thousand lesser names, who had to stand against evil men who would have murdered them if they'd been able to get away with it. That they were no longer confident they could get away with it was because a small number of western leaders had shoveled détente into the garbage can of history and decided to tell the truth. Had Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan and John Paul II been like Helmut Schmidt and Francois Mitterand and Pierre Trudeau and Jimmy Carter, the Soviet empire would have survived and the wall would still be standing.
Since I'm quoting from my own books, here's a final one, from the predecessor to The [Un]documented Mark Steyn and After America - America Alone. It wasn't just Schmidt and Mitterand, but the bulk of their electorates, too:

There were two forces at play in the late 20th century: in the eastern bloc, the collapse of Communism; in the west, the collapse of confidence. One of the most obvious refutations of Francis Fukuyama's famous thesis The End Of History – written at the victory of liberal pluralist democracy over Soviet Communism – is that the victors didn't see it as such. Americans – or at least non-Democrat-voting Americans – may talk about "winning" the Cold War but the French and the Belgians and Germans and Canadians don't. Very few British do. These are all formal Nato allies – they were, technically, on the winning side against a horrible tyranny few would wish to live under themselves. In Europe, there was an initial moment of euphoria: it was hard not be moved by the crowds sweeping through the Berlin Wall, especially as so many of them were hot-looking Red babes eager to enjoy a Carlsberg or Stella Artois with even the nerdiest running dog of imperialism. But, when the moment faded, pace Fukuyama, there was no sense on the Continent that our Big Idea had beaten their Big Idea. With the best will in the world, it's hard to credit the citizens of France or Italy as having made any serious contribution to the defeat of Communism. Au contraire, millions of them voted for it, year in, year out. And, with the end of the Soviet existential threat, the enervation of the west only accelerated.

That bit about "hot-looking Red babes" wasn't a literary whimsy on my part. I was in Berlin a few weeks after the Wall had been breached, when the streets were still full of young Germans wandering back and forth from east to west still in semi-bewilderment. Me and my mate met a couple of cute Osterbirds and had a drink with them in the free world, and then they took us on a brief tour of the disintegrated tyranny on the other side. It was a great moment to pick up chicks - and none of them seemed to mind that the fetching young lad from Frankfurt or Munich had spent most of the Eighties protesting against the deployment of US Cruise missiles in western Europe, and cheering rock stars who complained that Ron and Maggie would lead us to Armageddon.
Reagan and Thatcher won the war. Obama and Schröder and the like inherited the peace. Which is why today's anniversary has that strange, passive, evasive quality. Or as Obama would put it:

There is no challenge too great for a world that stands as one.

Generally speaking, when the world "stands as one" it's in the cause of inertia: Right now, the world stands as one in feeling it's no big deal if Iran goes nuclear, or Putin gobbles Ukraine, or the Islamic State starts head-chopping its way into Jordan, or members of certain unspecified multicultural communities plot to kill the Queen. The alternative to waiting for the world to "stand as one" is to stand up yourself, and stand for something. And now as in the Eighties there are few takers for that.

Columbus has become first-rate hockey town

Sunday, 01.18.2015 / 3:00 AM / Sunday Long Read

By Shawn Roarke - Director, Editorial

The scene that surrounded the Columbus Blue Jackets during Game 4 of their first-round Stanley Cup Playoff series at Nationwide Arena was unfathomable for longtime fans in the area.

Here was a team the city could call its own, playing in a state-of-the-art building with a rollicking crowd roaring with every opportunity by the home side. The noise flowed onto the ice surface in waves, the fans screaming for the goal that would extend the series against the Pittsburgh Penguins, the perennial NHL powerhouse and burgeoning rival.

The eyes of the hockey world were on the Ohio capital as the pesky Blue Jackets attacked, looking to make the statement that after a 15-year journey they had arrived as a force.

Ed Gingher, who runs the city's only AAA youth hockey program, was there that night. He is heavily invested in what the Blue Jackets do because it directly impacts the talent pool available to feed his program; plus he does some work for the franchise. He is devoted to the sport, having played and coached it for much of his life.

"I've never heard a building as loud as the one in Columbus during that series," Gingher said.

SUNDAY LONG READ

Oral history of 2010 World Junior final

By Pat Pickens | Special to NHL.com
Some of the most prominent members of the 2010 World Junior Championship final between the USA vs. Canada retold the story to the title game in their own words. READ MORE ›

• Gabriel Landeskog a born leader
• Nick Bjugstad building career on character
• Wayne Simmonds gives back, keeps promise

MORE SUNDAY LONG READ STORIES ›

Then, it got louder. The Blue Jackets, down to the last seconds of the game and in danger of trailing the best-of-7 series 3-1, saw the hockey gods reward the patience of a franchise and its fans.

Defenseman Jack Johnson, an enemy from his University of Michigan days turned hometown hero upon his trade to Columbus from the Los Angeles Kings, dumped the puck into the Pittsburgh zone with 30 seconds remaining. Columbus trailed 3-2 and had pulled the goalie for an extra attacker. Ryan Johansen, the first-round savior, beat wandering goalieMarc-Andre Fleury to the puck and threaded a pass through three Penguins onto the stick ofBrandon Dubinsky, who was imported for just such a moment. Dubinsky flicked his wrists, and the puck beat a diving Fleury across the goal line to tie the game.

The dream remained alive for Columbus and came into clearer focus when Nick Folignoscored in the third minute of overtime, delivering the Blue Jackets all the way back from three goals down and turning a likely insurmountable series deficit into a best-of-3 against the star-studded Penguins.

Columbus Dispatch reporter Aaron Portzline, an Ohio native who has covered the team since the beginning, was struck almost as much by the behavior of the fans as what was happening on the ice during the comeback.

"Just being above the crowd in the press box and looking down on those people, the sheer joy of the win in Game 4 was something that those people had waited so long to witness," Portzline said. "To taste a victory and the way it happened; it felt like a coming of age for the city and the sports fans in the city in that this is what it has felt like for other cities. It made people realize the next level that there is, gave them a taste of it and that the best is yet to come."

"I remember looking at the crowd in there and it was so loud in there. But, there were so many people as they were standing and cheering, they were processing. They were sort of trying to grab on to what this meant in the moment. Somewhere in that cheer was an 'Oh my god' moment."

Suddenly, fans were sleeping outside Nationwide Arena to get tickets to Game 6, even after the Blue Jackets lost Game 5 in Pittsburgh. An area of the city once shuttered after 5 p.m. was now the focal point for much of the hockey world.

Forward Jared Boll has been with the Blue Jackets since 2007, their longest-tenured member.

"Every year, it's seems like the fan base has grown and they've been more excited about the team and hockey in general," he said. "My first few years they were excited to go to the games and have a good time, but now it's grown more into they expect us to do well.

"They expect us to play hard and win games. That's the way it should be. They want to see a winning product on the ice and they want to see good hockey. I think that's good for the city."

Despite the building belief that the Blue Jackets were on the cusp of something magical, Game 6 did not deliver on the scoreboard. Evgeni Malkin, one of the best players in the world, scored a hat trick to help the Penguins take a four-goal lead, just enough to withstand another furious rally. The Penguins won the game 4-3 and the series 4-2.

But the Blue Jackets were far from defeated.

Fans camped out overnight at the Nationwide Arena prior
to Game 6 of the 2014 Stanley Cup Playoffs first round
against the Pittsburgh Penguins.
Photo: Jamie Sabau/NHLI (Click to enlarge)

The series that played out across 190 miles of Route 70 delivered the Blue Jackets their welcome-to-the-NHL moment and intensified the Pittsburgh-Columbus rivalry. This wasn't the four-and-done playoff series against theDetroit Red Wings from five years earlier. It was instead the moment when the Penguins and many others in the NHL realized that Columbus' hard work during the prior 18 years had paid dividends.

Duke Johnson, the general manager of The Ohio State University Ice Rink, also was at Nationwide Arena for the coming-of-age moments last spring. He has been a season-ticket holder since Day One, he said proudly.

After the growing pains, losing most of its games for more than a decade, the feeling of standing side-by-side with other fans and holding dear something new and exciting was a high point for Johnson, who began playing hockey back home in Omaha, Neb., and played professionally in Europe before settling at OSU.

"The team finally came together and it was a real positive experience to go to the games when we got to the playoffs to play Pittsburgh," Johnson said. "Everybody talked about how exciting that type of hockey is, which was different than it was for years. I think it did help the growth for this year. It's amazing what winning can do. Even if you are not winning, you are competing and you can be really happy.

"That's what they did last year. They competed every night last year, and that is what you are looking for."

Hockey is hot in Columbus. The Blue Jackets are trying to claw their way out of an early-season tailspin caused by an almost unimaginable number of injuries, and the fans believe it will happen.

Plus, the 2015 Honda NHL All-Star Game is coming to town. For three days starting Jan. 23, Columbus will again be the focal point of the hockey universe, playing host to the sport's biggest stars and personalities.

Columbus can't wait for the opportunity to strut its stuff.

Yes, the Ohio State football team, which won the national championship game against Oregon on Monday, is the clear-cut king of the sports mountain in Columbus, but the city is no longer just a college town. It's a hockey town too.

"Columbus has forever been a college town," Portzline said. "That's how a lot of people still see Columbus. It's Ohio State, let's not kid ourselves. Columbus is huge, but it doesn't feel it. It was a college town. The world's biggest college town, that's how people saw it; how Columbus saw itself. So, its rivals were Ann Arbor, Bloomington, West Lafayette, State College.

"I think with the Blue Jackets, now you are playing Los Angeles, now Pittsburgh hates you, now you are playing the Rangers, Chicago, Toronto, Montreal. It has put Columbus in conversations with cities that it was never in a conversation with. I think it has helped change the mindset of people. It's changed the perspective and the view of the self for a lot of people in Columbus as well."

Columbus is a major-league city these days, but the journey has been anything but conventional.

Football is king in Columbus, specifically the college brand played by the Buckeyes. There is no denying this. The scenes following the national championship game attest to the power the program holds over the city and much of the state.

Hockey could rarely compete. As late as 1991 there were two sheets of ice in Columbus: The Ohio State University Ice Rink and the Ohio State Fairgrounds Coliseum.

A string of minor-league teams played at the Coliseum, but few found longevity.

The Checkers were first in line, occupying the Coliseum as part of the International Hockey League circuit from 1966 to 1970. In 1971, the Golden Seals took up the IHL mantle and lasted two years, replaced by the Owls, the final attempt at IHL hockey in the city. They lasted four years and relocated after the 1976-77 season.

The ECHL arrived in 1991 with the Chill, but the start of a real rebirth was almost 15 years away.

Not only was the Coliseum an outdated venue considered by many unable to sustain a professional team, but there was little other hockey infrastructure in the city.

Ohio State was its only recreational rink. It ran 22 hours day and hosted college activities, the city's youth program (Capital Amateur Hockey Association), and a four-team adult program. There was one high school with a hockey program: Upper Arlington.

Other cities in Ohio were considerably ahead on the hockey curve.

Cleveland could bill itself as a former NHL city, home of the Cleveland Barons from 1976-78. The Cleveland Crusaders of the World Hockey Association were a tenant from 1972-76.

The Cleveland Lumberjacks of the IHL had a successful nine-year run starting in 1992. At their peak, the Lumberjacks averaged more than 9,000 fans per game. The youth programs in the area were vibrant.

Columbus Blue Jackets mascot Stinger was once the name of a WHA team in Cincinnati between the years of 1975 and 1979. (Photo: Getty Images)

Cincinnati had the Stingers in the WHA, multiple entries in the American Hockey League, and the Mohawks in the IHL.

NHL forward Mike Rupp grew up in Parma Heights, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland. He played youth hockey there, went to the Lumberjacks games, was selected to play in the Ontario Hockey League, and became a first-round selection of the New York Islanders(No. 9) in the 1998 NHL Draft.

Rupp played 39 games for the Blue Jackets in 2005-06 and enjoyed the experience, but he remembered being highly skeptical when Columbus was awarded a franchise by the NHL in 1997, joining an expansion class that included Nashville, Atlanta and St. Paul, Minn.

"Everyone wondered why it was going there, I think," Rupp said. "People probably thought Cincinnati would be better even though Columbus is obviously the capital. In Cleveland, it was more, 'Why aren't we getting one? We should be the team. We had the team.'"

There were a lot of doubters, but a perfect storm was forming in Central Ohio that helped the Blue Jackets hit the ground with some momentum.

The latest and greatest of the minor-league teams in Columbus arrived in 1991 with expectations it would go by the wayside like its predecessors.

But general manager Dave Paitson was young and energetic. He believed the Chill could beat the odds. Even though Paitson came from the Indiana Pacers of the NBA, where he began his career in sports, he had a bit of a hockey background, having spent three years with the Indianapolis Ice of the IHL. More importantly, he had a marketing background and understood that the Chill could not survive by counting on hockey fans alone.

"We went all-out with a slap-people-across-the-face manner," said Paitson, now an associate athletic director at Sam Houston State University. "But people liked it because it was fun and hockey is a great sport when you get in to see it. So we had success where other people hadn't found that formula and, obviously, we did."

Espen Knutsen holds the distinction of being named
Columbus' first-ever All-Star when he played in the
2002 NHL All-Star game in Los Angeles.
Photo: Getty Images (Click to enlarge)

The Chill became the talk of the town, filling Fairgrounds Coliseum on a regular basis. They drew more than 5,800 fans a game and became a national success story, featured on network news and in major sports publications.

"It just caught fire," Paitson said. "That got media attention, and all of a sudden we are getting national media attention. Why? I couldn't tell you. Sometimes you have to be a little fortunate. The timing was right for hockey with that cycle of minor-league hockey. It was a little bit timing, a little bit of need in the city, and a little bit how we approached it. And then people just embraced it."

Paitson sells himself and the Chill short in that explanation.

The Chill made people embrace hockey and the team. Wacky contests during intermissions and viral marketing before the concept was fully developed assured them of full houses even when the team was not playing its best. Chill games became more than hockey games, they became social events. More than a few non-hockey fans were converted by attending the big-top atmosphere created by Paitson and his assistants.

The Chill made an even bigger contribution than raising hockey's profile in a town that cared excessively about college football and more casually about college basketball.

"It's Ohio State football first second and third, and then Ohio State basketball, and nothing else matters," Paitson said. "That's the way it was."

The Chill thawed out in 1999, playing their last season at the Fairgrounds and drawing fewer than 4,000 fans a game, which was still a good number in the ECHL. But with the Blue Jackets and the NHL on the horizon, the Chill decided to end their eight-year run in Columbus. After a dormant season, they relocated to Reading, Pa.

But the Chill established a blueprint that could become the syllabus for a high-level marketing class at Ohio State, and deeper roots that would nourish and stabilize the interest in hockey that was developing in the city and open the door for the Blue Jackets.

"It really was a series of dominoes that almost really had to fall in perfect order for things to happen on the timeframe that was there with NHL expansion," Paitson said. "Had we started any later, I don't see how Columbus would have made it in and would have been able to build that groundswell."

The Chill's legacy is visible throughout Columbus in the form of ice rinks, which feed a growing demand to play the game.

Remember the stats from 1991? Two rinks, the one youth organization, the one high school team, the four adult teams? It's totally different now.

The city added 11 rinks in the past 24 years. Five of those have been part of the Chiller franchise, which was started by the Chill soon after it arrived in Columbus.

Though there was some altruism in building the first Chiller, in nearby Dublin, the Chill did it out of necessity. With the paucity of available ice time, they were forced to hold early-morning practices during the week, a trend that was not ideal for management and did not endear the organization to its players.

"The pitch to our owner was, 'Listen, there isn't anything in the community,'" Paitson said. "There had been rinks here before and they had come and gone too, but I thought if we could manage this right and put it in the right place, we could make that part of the business work the other 22 hours of the day. But we really needed a practice facility. Practicing at 6 a.m. to 7:15 -- that's all the time we had -- was not a great selling point. It wasn't easy and it wasn't enough time on the ice either."

PHOTO GALLERY: Hockey in Columbus

The first Chiller was a huge success and others followed every few years: Chiller Easton (1997), which featured a NHL sheet and an Olympic sheet; Chiller Ice Works (2001); and Chiller North (2004). NTPRD Chiller, which opened in 2003, is in nearby Springfield.

The influx of rinks changed the face of hockey in Columbus.

"The one lasting thing [the Chill] left this city that should never be forgotten is it is the Chill who started building rinks, before the NHL arrived, before the NHL said we think we want to be there," Portzline said. "They started building the rinks. All this grass-roots hockey, all these suburban kids saying I want to play hockey that started with the Chill and was pushed to a different level with the Blue Jackets."

Gone are the days when the hockey community was cultish, with each participant wearing his or her hockey accoutrements as a badge of honor while trudging toward whatever undesirable ice time was available at the OSU rink.

"When you talk about 20 years ago, yes, everybody came through here," said Johnson, the OSU rink manager. "Today, with all the Chillers in town, and they are mostly Chillers, there are a lot of people that don't come here anymore. Being with the university, I have two varsity teams, and our goal is to help the student athlete, so those teams take up quite a bit of time. We don't have much youth hockey anymore here, there's no high school hockey here; it's all gone to the Chillers. Now there are people in town that don't know we are here. That's how much it has changed.

"It's bittersweet because you don't meet the same type of people you were meeting before because there are people that have not been here."

But the growth in the game and the level of skill being displayed because of the rink-building boom is undeniable.

According to numbers collected by the Blue Jackets in a survey about the state of the game in the area, there were 4,500 youth and 2,800 adult registered players in 2012. The Chiller Ice Hockey League is the third-largest USA Hockey registered adult league in the country. More than 2,500 children are in the Junior Jackets Learn to Play Program, which has experienced 15 percent growth since its founding in 2002.

There are six youth hockey organizations and 20 high school programs.

High-level players in Columbus are starting to get noticed throughout the country, playing for the prestigious National Team Developmental Program run by USA Hockey, showing up at the World Junior Championship, playing in the Canadian Hockey League, and dotting Division 1 college rosters in the United States.

Connor Murphy, who came to the Columbus area in 2002 when his dad, Gord, was hired as an assistant coach by the Blue Jackets, spent his formative years in the city's youth system and plays for theArizona Coyotes after being selected in the first round (No. 20) of the 2011 NHL Draft.

Cole Cassels was drafted by the Vancouver Canucks in the third round (No. 85) in 2013. Like Connor Murphy, Cassels is the son of an NHL player, Andrew Cassels, who relocated to Columbus to work for the Blue Jackets.

Forward Sean Kuraly, drafted by the San Jose Sharks in the fifth round (No. 133) in 2011, is having a dominant freshman season with the University of Miami Red Hawks.

Others are on the horizon, some playing for the AAA Blue Jackets, a program started in 2004. This season, the U-18 team, made up entirely of players from Ohio, has been ranked as high as No. 3 nationally. Last season, the AAA peewee team won the prestigious Quebec International Pee-Wee Hockey Tournament.

"I would say it has been fast-tracked here over the last five to seven years where we have seen great strides in our players as they are taking full advantage of the opportunities that are there," said Gingher, who runs the AAA program. "It's fun to watch."

In a week's time, Columbus gets to put its hockey growth in front of fans of the NHL when the All-Star Game comes to Nationwide Arena.

The growth of the Blue Jackets, who are again morphing into a team to be respected across the rest of the League after its playoff showing last year and weathering those early-season injuries to key players, will be in the narrative.

The hockey infrastructure also will be part of the tale that needs to be told during hockey's midseason gala.

But the growth of Columbus as a city and supporter of professional hockey will be perhaps the most evident story of the weekend.

The fans who crammed Nationwide Arena last spring proved this is a major-league city that has allowed the Blue Jackets to ease, ever so slightly, the stranglehold enjoyed here by the Ohio State football program.

Word is getting out, louder and faster by the day, that hockey is a big part of the fabric.

"When I was there for a year, we were terrible and the fans were awesome," said Rupp, who played for six NHL teams. "When I was [with the New Jersey Devils] before Columbus, we could do whatever we wanted and no one would ever recognize us, but in Columbus, people would want to pay for a meal, or when you brought your car in to get serviced, people would be like, 'Oh, I'm a big fan.' It just took me back to being a kid from Ohio and seeing it. These people love it, they just love it.

"I would like to see where it can go. I don't think they have tapped that yet. The All-Star Game is a big shot in the arm toward that."

R.J. Umberger arrived in Columbus in 2002 from nearby Pittsburgh to play college hockey for OSU. Six years later he was back as a member of the Blue Jackets. He stayed until 2014, when he was traded to the Philadelphia Flyers.

He's told all his NHL friends who will be making the trip to Columbus to take part in the All-Star festivities that they are going to be impressed by the city, the citizens, and the passion for the sport.

"I told a couple of guys on [the Flyers], [Claude] Giroux and the like, who might be going to the All-Star Game, I said you're going to be blown away how good it's going to be here," Umberger said. "The fans are crazy. You talk about some of the things these fans went through the first 10 years and how passionate they were to stay with the program, the organization those years, it's amazing.

"It's really changed since the [2014] playoffs. You go places and people know who you are. Other than Ohio State football, hockey is the big thing here now. People are grabbing onto it. You see it in youth hockey. The youth hockey teams are going all around the country and doing well. People are talking about this area. It's got a lot to do with ex-Blue Jackets guys staying here and ex-Ohio State players staying here and coaching these kids. It's making this place very attractive."

Paitson may have had the best seat in town to watch the growth. He arrived as an outsider, selling hockey at a time when it wasn't a prime property and helped grow it into a sport people in the city were ready to consume and embrace, paving the way for the Blue Jackets.

He hopes to be back for the All-Star Game on Jan. 25 (5 p.m. ET, NBCSN, CBC, TVA Sports) to experience how far the process has moved along, but if not, he knows he helped author an incredible hockey story.

"You look at downtown Columbus today and you think about what it was and what it is today and it is mindboggling really. It's just great. It was what the city needed," Paitson said. "Columbus is such a great sports town. Somebody was going to make something happen there at some point, there's no doubt.

"It's too good a town for that not to happen."