Forget About Phoenix: Are Sean Avery And The Stars Moving To Toronto? (Satire)

(Photo by Jason Kempin/Getty Images)

Will Sean Avery wind up playing for the Toronto North Stars in the NHL?

As I sat on the shore of Lake Ontario at the Colonel Samuel Smith Park yesterday, missing the Penguins-Hurricanes game in the Stanley Cup semi-finals, I had a vision.

We were watching the lights along the margin of the bay of the cross-border region called "Tor-Buff-Chester". In case you never heard of it, Tor-Buff-Chester is the big urban area which stretches from Toronto through Buffalo to Rochester.

I had a vision of Sean Avery playing for the Toronto North Stars in the NHL.

Meanwhile, Malkin and Crosby were making life miserable for the 'Canes goalie, Cam Ward, winning 6-2.

Who are you calling hockey-mad?

My friend showed me the park. She said The Smith is one of Toronto's newest and largest waterfront parks. It's located in the community of New Toronto, just west of the downtown core.

Smith Park is almost 200 acres and it was created from lake fill in front of the former Lakeshore Psychiatric Hospital.

This park with cobble beaches and protected wetland blending into the lawns of the former hospital grounds is known as "the jewel of the Lakeshore", Amy told me.
 
She was worried I might be obsessed with hockey and with one hockey player in particular. She thought it would be good for me to see the tranquil, waterfront sanctuary of wetlands, woods, shore and meadow, and to get away from hockey for a while.

The park turned out to be a short drive from downtown Toronto, where the Leafs play at the Air Canada Centre, below the CN Tower, and beside the domed home of the Toronto Blue Jays. From the park, we could see the brightly lit towers of Toronto, including the dome and the tallest free-standing structure on land in the world.

On the day Crosby, Malkin, and the Penguins won Game 3 of the NHL semi-finals and pushed the Canes to elimination, we made a pilgrimage to the place many believe the Stanley Cup belongs. And then it hit me...

What if the Dallas Stars filed for bankruptcy, right after the Phoenix Coyotes, and moved up north? Instead of the Coyotes moving to Hamilton, the Dallas Stars could become the Toronto North Stars. And what if Sean Avery had to rejoin the Stars and play hockey in his old stompin' grounds?!

We met at the Pickering Public Library, where I was Writer In Residence, and we traveled from Avery's old hometown up to the new urban area north of Toronto to see “Karshed”: Yousuf Karsh Selected Portraits at The McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg.

We stopped at a new library in Markham, north of Toronto, where she worked. They decimated the Dewey decimal system and replaced it with a system that actually makes sense.

“Karshed” featured a collection of thirty rare, limited edition, portraits by Karsh, including Muhammad Ali, Winston Churchill, Jacques Cousteau, Ernest Hemingway, Helen Keller, Georgia O’Keeffe, Andy Warhol, and many more shown exclusively at the McMichael.

Amy wanted to see Albert Einstein, Albert Schweitzer, Picasso, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Gertrude Stein. I wanted to see Muhammad Ali and Ernest Hemingway.

It reminded me of the Woody Allen routine that goes: "I was in Europe many years ago with Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway had just written his first novel, and Gertrude Stein and I read it, and

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