It's near the end of March Madness, which means casual sports fans across the North America, and in the Bay Area in particular, start caring about the National Hockey League. Well, maybe "caring" is too strong a word. Noticing? Glancing at the hockey scores and standings when they're done with the stories about minor NFL signings, and baseball spring training notes and box scores? Remembering that the NHL exists? The Stanley Cup playoffs are right around the corner, and they're what most of the non-die hard hockey fans really care about. The NHL regular season is mostly ignored by the sports-viewing public, a situation made worse by the fact that the NHL is no longer on ESPN (or rather, ESPN2 when they didn't have more important things to broadcast, like meaty, red-faced dudes named Magnus pushing Peugeot’s around a beach somewhere), but rather the Food Network. more ›

Yeah, the Giants lost the season opener last night 6-1 as Jake Peavy shut the Black & Orange down, but that, of course, isn't what everyone is talking about. In something that should be par for the course this season, anything the Giants do will have two components to it-- how the Giants do and what happens to Barry. Barry lined the first pitch he saw for a double and scored the first Giants' run of the season (brought in by Lance Niekro, hopefully a good omen) but didn't do much else more ›

With regular seasons winding down, college basketball conferences around the country are busily seeding teams for their conference tournaments. These tournaments embody the American Dream in that they give nearly every team in the conference one last shot to make the Big Show. For small and mid-major conferences that may get only one invite to the field of 64, the conference tournament actually supplants the regular season by giving the conference's automatic NCAA bid to the tournament champion rather than the regular-season champion. more ›

Someone call ESPN2, because we've found the next new hot nerd-sport craze -- the Exploratorium is hosting the 2006 International Rubik's Cube Competition this Saturday! As the calendar announcement proudly states, "In past years, many world records have been set at such tournaments including the 3x3x3 cube single solve (11.75 seconds), the one-handed solve (23.76 seconds), and the blindfold solve (1:58:32)." We're not entirely sure why the event lasts from 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. if everyone's going to solve the cube blindfolded in less than two minutes, but they seem to have had fun last year. Anyone can enter for the price of museum admission, but do note that you'll be going up against such cube luminaries as:

Jessica Fridrich, the creator of the most popular speed cubing system, the Fridrich Method; Lars Petrus, 4th-place finisher in the 1982 Rubik's Cube World Championships representing Sweden; Shotaro Makisumi, a 14-year-old freshman from Japan attending high school in Pasadena and number one in the world of the 3x3x3 Rubik's Cube, average solve at 14.52 seconds; and Tyson Mao, holder of the blind solve record at 1: 58:32.