There’s nothing quite like it. After 120 minutes (the equivalent of two full games) of play, and five hours of real time, the players are far too exhausted to make hard shots, race for the puck, or even stand up straight.

Tonight, the Vancouver Canucks (with former Hab Yan Bulis) beat the Dallas Stars (with former Hab Mike Ribeiro) 5-4 in fourth overtime, two minutes short of becoming the fifth-longest game in NHL history.

Funny enough, while it easily set a new record for Vancouver, Dallas had a longer game which went into fifth overtime in 2003.

Now, of course, the best thing to do is look at the game’s stats. It was quite a night for Vancouver’s Roberto Luongo — his much-anticipated first NHL playoff game had him see 78 shots on goal, at least 36 of them consecutive saves.

But the real star of the night, of course, was Vancouver’s #18, defenceman Rory Fitzpatrick. The almost-all-star didn’t have any goals, any assists or even any shots, but I was cheering for him the entire night. After all, he was drafted by the Canadiens. And if we can’t make the playoffs, at least we can be confident we planted the seeds of other playoff dreams.

Throughout the night I noticed that the TV people are still kinda flying by the seat of their pants on all this. Somewhere in the third overtime, my CBC signal lost its video feed for about 15 minutes (the audio was fine). No problem, I switched to RDS, who were in turn taking their feed from Versus in the U.S.

But then RDS lots its Versus feed. To their credit, they quickly replaced it with a backup feed of some sort and got back on track. The only problem was that this feed had the Versus play-by-play. They had to keep that audio so you could hear the crowd, but lower the levels so the RDS French play-by-play would drown out the English version.

Eventually, CBC regained its video feed, but then the audio got replaced by some guys doing analysis of the Eastern conference. I started wondering why everything was going so badly until I tuned to TSN and saw the country music station instead. It was then I figured the problem was probably with Videotron.

Don’t they know better than to have problems in triple overtime?