Hello, this is a feature that will run through the entire season and aims to recap the weekend’s events and boils those events down to one admittedly superficial fact or stupid opinion about each team. Feel free to complain about it.

The initial horror that I felt upon hearing the words, "The NHL is going to have six outdoor games this season," has long since receded and I've accepted this fact as largely being a matter of course.

The League, despite how well it did in the lockout-shortened season to sell tickets and bring in relatively monstrous television ratings (well, as far as hockey broadcasts go), likely still does need to make up some of the money lost to nixing 510 games out of last season's schedule, including the Winter Classic.

That they decided to have a re-do of the Winter Classic in Ann Arbor, which promises to make an insane amount of money behind 100,000-plus tickets being sold and everything else that usually comes with the event, is perfectly reasonable.

That they added a Heritage Classic likewise makes sense because there hadn't been one in a while.

That they added three games in New York City ahead of the Super Bowl seemed like rather a crass cash grab but, again, they're trying to make up lost ground.

That there's one in Los Angeles, well, everyone likes a sideshow.

Calling it, as Gary Bettman actually did, simply a matter of "giving the fans what they want" rather than "a good business opportunity" seemed a little silly, but again it was understandable.

We probably all went around thinking that this was a one-off thing, and that the outdoor-game schedule would return to normal once the bad taste of the lockout had finally receded from even the most cynical and embittered fan's mouth. This did nothing to stop the not-so-slow creep of the outdoor game virus into other levels of the sport; there will be at least 10 not including the six staged by the NHL in North America this season, and I basically hated it. With that having been said, though, the league returning to an annual Winter Classic and bi-annual Heritage Classic seemed sensible enough.

Well, this is the NHL we're talking about. Rationality doesn't exactly enter into things where the league's broader, national fanbase on both sides of the border are concerned. No, it seems as though the League is, after the success it has found in having six outdoor games to give the fans what they want — that apparently being, "to be parted from their money" — they might as well go in for another big-money move again.

The Washington Capitals got the Winter Classic largely, one assumes, as a consequence of good soldier Ted Leonsis helping to hardline the lockout (and also the moping about his team's not having had one). But in addition to that, it seems probable that the league will have three more "Stadium Series" games and possibly another Heritage Classic.

At first my reaction was something akin to, "Seriously?" but now it's more along the lines of, "Who even cares any more?"

All that talk about the League wanting to be cautious in how it does outdoor games so as not to ruin the specialness or whatever other descriptors you want to tack on about The Experience of such events went out the window when the money started rolling in, which one supposes makes plenty of sense given that this is a business.

Does it matter that people might one day tire of this kind of thing and the money will stop running hot and cold out of the faucets at NHL headquarters? Probably, but this is for all the negative stuff you can mention about it (which is to say, a lot of things), the league is extremely well-run from a business perspective and they'll feel the train coming long before they hear its mournful whistle.

The thing with these games, at this point, is that it's not about specialness, it's about drilling into as many veins of cash the league can come across. Is there a reasonable middle ground between the one and occasionally two events per year the NHL was running before this and the four- and five-game overkill seasons? The math says it's three.

But what, really, does the NHL care what you, the average fan in a market that mathematically isn't likely to be getting any such games this year or next, think? You'll probably watch the game and if you don't it's not a big deal. You're not paying $200 or more for tickets plus concessions plus commemorative merchandise, you're not a sponsor paying absurd sums for ad space. You don't matter in the grand scheme of things, at least not until your team gets one, and then you become the sucker who's going to shell out a ton of money for an event you were just complaining about a year ago.