Life sucks when your favorite sport is locked out. If Gary Bettman was putting on hockey games instead of spit-shining what's left of his public image, the Columbus Blue Jackets would have played the Vancouver Canucks last night. Instead, solitude and desolation for hockey fans in Ohio.


Unless! Zack A. wrote in last night to tell us that a bar for Blue Jackets fans had other ideas:

I live across from R Bar (Columbus Blue Jackets home bar) and they are playing a XBox simulation of the game that was supposed to be played tonight. From what I can tell the bar looks packed and people are loving it. Columbus loves their Blue Jackets.


Eventually Zack and his friends went over to the bar and shot the video above. At first, he writes, all they found was "a bunch of people goings nuts," but around the beginning of the third period, the team's longtime radio announcers, George Matthews and Bill Davidge, showed up to call the Xbox simulation, an occurrence for which "the crowd just went wild." (It's Matthews's voice you can hear in the video above.) As Zack writes, "We thought it was going to be a joke but it turned out to be an awesome time," which is exactly what we thought at first, and exactly what it looks like in the end. Lest you think that it's weird or crazy to spend your Friday watching simulation video game hockey, consider your plan of action if your favorite sport was locked out, and your team's announcers showed up at your local bar to call a simulation of one of their games. You'd probably stick around, no?

Of course, simulation or not, the Blue Jackets still lost. Very authentic!