The defending world champions, the Red Wings, are out of the Stanley Cup playoffs in the first round. They were the only reason to get out of bed in early Spring in Detroit. They were swept by Anaheim’s Mighty Ducks, who are owned by the Disney organization and named after a children’s movie. The also-rans from the Original Six teams of the NHL include the New York Rangers, Boston Bruins, Chicago Blackhawks and Montreal’s Les Habitants, the Canadians. It is a sad day for Big time Hockey After the exhilaration of last year’s triumph, we are back to calling hockey’s former kings what we called the sad-sack Detroit hockey teams of the ’70s. The Dead Wings.

I do not even recognize some of the teams that advanced. The minor market teams are going to go the distance and the advertisers are filled with dismay. Maybe it is natural to feel this way after something as dramatic as a twenty-four seven video spectacular war. The malaise seems to have spread across the greater industry and it is a sorry time for professional sports. Michael Jordan is retiring again, this time finally, and I couldn’t tell you what is happening on the hardcourt. Baseball has started again, the Yankees coming out of the gate real strong, but the big news this morning is not about runs-batted-in. It is about how the athletes can protect themselves from Severe Acute Respiratory Disease when the ten teams scheduled to play in Toronto before the All-Star break travel north of the border.

The League is telling opponents of the Blue Jays that they don’t have to wear rubber gloves or M-95 face masks. They can even sign autographs. But they should carry their own pens and wash their hands a lot. Cryptically, he League says that either the problem will be resolved by the All-Star break or something more restrictive will be in effect. That sounds ominous, but it reflects reality. Contagious disease spread by aerosol transmission (Achoo!) tend to die down in the summer when the windows open up and people are free to roam about. They tend to come back strong in the Fall when the kids congregate in classrooms and the windows close and we huddle in our buildings against the cold. Simple cycle, totally depending on human patterns of activity. Winter is flu season.

SARS drove the news from Iraq off the top of the news today, though there is still so much happening. Hong Kong is in a panic over the disease. People are stockpiling rice and cooking oil and are preparing to hunker down in their homes until things settle down. I am already in pretty good shape on that score, all of us here that took prudent steps about Osama bin Laden. Remember the War on Terror? That was the one before the last. I had to give some pep talks at the office. I carefully worked through the issue. Saddam wasn’t the terror threat, I explained. He was an enabler of terror. He was the nation state and the money machine that provided infrastructure and protection for the al Qaida terrorists. This was a necessary step to tighten the noose on the real terrorists.

I talked to someone in the counter-terror business yesterday. He is one of the people who jumped into the growth industry and is guaranteed career security. I felt restless. I was watching the news about the OPEC summit, about the danger of falling oil prices, the concern of the oil ministers to keep crude right around $25 a barrel. It is a funny thing, not so that you would break out laughing, but I was concerned about soaring prices just a couple weeks ago. I am not nearly as nervous about the possible use of a weapon of mass destruction near my apartment as I was when the Third Infantry Division and the First Marines were still on the highway south of Baghdad. But I asked honestly how al Qaida was doing. The analyst sighed. He said that they had definitely been hurt. The arrest of Khalid Shaikh Muhammed hurt them and they were now aware that all their communications were vulnerable. They had gone back to couriers and their command and control was slow as the spread of SARS. They now know that if someone ratted them out a bomb could appear in the middle of their dinner table or queen-sized bed within the hour.

“So we are less vulnerable than we were, right?”

“Well, that is all relative. Certainly they are more nervous. But they are very cautious.” The analyst didn’t look happy. He was tired, like most of the folks that had worked long hours in support of the war, and it was clear that the post-mortem sorting of the captured records was going to take still more unsung effort. He cleared his throat and said: “They are a lot more desperate to do something to show that they are still around.”

“So you are saying that it is more likely that they are going to do something?”

“No” he said, spreading his arms. “I’m not saying that. All I am saying is that they are already here in America, that they have cells that are well established and we don’t know what they are going to do. We are watching the ones we suspect but we know that there are a lot more that we don’t know about.”

“So we have blabbed how we cracked the case on Khalid and now we really don’t know anything.”

He nodded. “It is a cyclic thing,” he said. “We just don’t know what their cycle is.”

I thought to myself that I preferred cycles I understood. The cycles of professional sports teams, decades long that bring the Dead Wings back to life and once more to ignoble retirement. Or the Flu.

At least I know when that is going to come back. In the Fall. So let’s enjoy the summer while we can.

Coyright 2003 Vic Socotra