Typically this would be an opportune time to drone on senselessly about the 49ers and their latest logic-denying event, but why? They're going to be senselessly erratic for most of the year, no result will be a straight line to the one before or after, and all along people will be bitching about Jimmy Garoppolo in good times and bad because it's all anyone wants to do. It's just another useless argument like a million others.
But there is one thing on which we can all agree, or at least most of us anyway. Mike Emrick retiring from hockey broadcasting is good for him and bad for us.
Now this is the part where people who don't watch hockey wander off to drool over whatever George Kittle is having for breakfast. Fine. Have a nice day somewhere else.
But Emrick, NBC's lead hockey broadcaster and the giant of his industry, was one of the very few things upon which there was near unanimity. Like Vin Scully, and locally Duane Kuiper and Mike Krukow, there was very little dissent. Emrick did the thing well, very well, and for a very long time (47 years). He was America's voice for an entire sport the way Scully was for baseball, and with any luck some day for Doris Burke, whose own cache of public opinion is as close to unanimous as the average Bulgarian election.
It's hard to get that level of agreement on anything in any segment of the multiple and vexing American societies. For whatever set of sociological reasons you choose to cite, we're about six countries now, and on the athletic front we can't agree on even basic things like whether games should be played or not. We create arguments where they don't exist because we think that's what the First Amendment was created to do — spur GOAT screamers about LeBron James and Michael Jordan.
Emrick, though, was a clean bullseye every time, and left while still at his working apex. He was a thesaurus of verbs to describe the events before him, and games without his presence seemed about six percent less meaningful by definition. The minimal slippage you might have detected in his work this year was because he wasn't in the buildings where the playoff games were set because of the 'rona, and Emrick could bring you the building like few others. That was a comfort in these rancorous times.
So we're down one more proper amusement. C'est la guerre, suckers. The world isn't shrinking, it's collapsing in on itself, and Emrick isn't there to offer us a distraction any more. It may be a small thing, but we're living in a time where small things get noticed more — say, an unimportant thing like human companionship. So glasses up to a titan, and now we return you to your regular programming, namely:
"Garoppolo's second half passer rating was only 62.15, so let's get rid of him now while we still can. Now let's take some calls."