Be honest, you thought we were never coming back, didn’t you. 500 and that’s it. Hell, I thought we were never coming back too. But there are bills to pay and swanky, drunken parties to justify, so here we are.

Here we are, in 2011, with

I don’t know why I’m that excited. We barely even talk about Martin Brodeur’s demise (I do get in a ‘dead man skating’ line late in the show). But I love Wyshynski, mainly because I can have him on the show to talk about hockey and we don’t actually talk about hockey at all, really. Well, we do talk about the Winter Classic, what it means for the NHL and NBC and why the premise for about it’s demise because of A LITTLE RAIN is about as lazy as column writing can get.

So yeah, there’s that. We also wonder how in the world a terrible Fiesta Bowl can get 10.8 million viewers and there’s a debate about whether it should be in baseball stadiums, football stadiums or really awesome locations like Central Park and the National Mall, making the damn game as close to pond hockey as it could get.

Yeah, there’s also a chat about how cool the All-Star Game will be this year, asking the captains to pick teams on the spot (or a few days before) and what logistical issues that will create for the league, namely the fact that we don’t know what color uniforms our All-Stars will be wearing, thus crushing any ability for fans to buy the jerseys in advance of the game like in years past.

All of that, plus more hockey-related banter too. But mostly, because we’re two curmudgeons from New Jersey, we talk about sportstalk radio memes — ah, the classic go-to-break tease — and whether New Years is a time to be excited about the prospects of a new year…a time to reboot, as it were…or a time to freak out that another year has gone by and you’re running out of time to make this shit work before you have to give it up and grow up because you have a family now and you can’t just sit around and play on Twitter all day. (Well, that got personal fast, didn’t it). Oh, we also talk about Cheers, Frazier and other media memories of times gone by.

So…we’re back. Happy New Year. Hockey and a lot of other great stuff.

(Oh, the song at the beginning…Braid’s First Day Back. Ah, to be an emo kid in the 90s).