It’s Monday morning, and time to confess. ‘cantstopthegrier’s real name isn’t ‘cantstopthegrier’. There might be some people reading that are new to the Internets, so I figured I’d start slow. The reason for this confession will be clear in a minute. Actually, I’m about to reveal his real name. It’s Doug Santana.

Now before you all jump to google and find his sex tape, there’s actually a good reason for revealing this personal information about my long-time friend. As loyal readers are no doubt aware, Doug is a fan of the hockey rumors, and by extension, the biggest hockey rumor site, hockeybuzz.com. For those of you that aren’t aware of it or don’t read it, I understand. But it is a force. According to Eklund, the “anonymous” blogger there that posts most of the rumors, hockeybuzz gets twenty million hits a month. That’s a hell of a lot. That’s about a million times more that we get. Other than Eklund, they have bloggers dedicated to every team in the NHL. There are two Sharks bloggers there currently, and we’ve commented on their posts before, Ryan Garner and Mark Freitas.

Where am I going with this? Doug entered us into the “Next Great Hockey Blogger” competition on hockeybuzz, sending Eklund links to five of our past posts. And here is the starting bracket. As you can see, there’s Doug’s name at #12 in the Southwest bracket. Out of 416 applications, Doug has made it to the top 64. I actually wanted to reveal all this last week, but we held off, because the idea was for both of us to be in the contest as a team. Eklund is apparently not the greatest correspondent, and Doug’s emails reiterating the situation have gone into a black hole.

Either way, the first post is due tomorrow morning, and Doug is working on it right now. I want to get the word out, because I think the way the contest will work is that fans will vote on the individual matchups. Get ready to vote for us! Or at least read the post and make up your mind for yourself. I will be posting progress notes on the whole contest as time goes along, so stay tuned.