Freeze the puck, eh?

MONTREAL, Canada -- The Canadiens were playing the Penguins only a few blocks from our hotel this weekend in hockey-crazed Montreal. Hockey was on every t.v. in every bar, but, as it turns out, I don't mind watching hockey on t.v. (not as much as football, at any rate). I even checked the scores, as you can see here.

At one point I offered up the tidbit that at any given moment, there's at least one if not two hockey pucks stashed in the freezer at 2117 Chadbourne, ready for a game to break out. ERD, ever the investigative journalist, challenged me to defend the claim that frozen pucks make for a better game. At the time, and with the encouragement of an engineer sitting next to us at the bar, I made the assertion that a frozen puck interacts more efficiently with the ice because it reduces friction, since both ice and puck are in a similar state (i.e. frozen). I still believe that to be true, although the Science of Hockey says that a frozen puck is superior on the ice because it doesn't bounce as much as a tepid rubber puck.

Listen, I'm no physicist, but either way: if you're gonna drop the puck, hoser^*, you gotta freeze it first.

^* According to the Urban Dictionary, "hoser" refers to the hockey losers who had to hose down the ice after a game, prior to the inception of the zamboni, which is my favorite part of a hockey game anyway.