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.

Here's a quick recap of the Sharks season so far (broken into 20 game segments, and ignoring the stupid OTL/SOL column):

First half: 27-14, Awesome
Second half so far: 19-20, Very mediocre, but back on track lately

The highlights of the season so far:
-Joe Thornton, the best player to ever wear a Sharks jersey (with genuine apologies to Igor Larionov fans), is still a stud, and having another 100+ point campaign.
-Patrick Marleau continues to be stud 1-a.
-Mike Grier has been a great pickup, with the kind of strong 2-way play that Sharks fans haven't seen since Mike Ricci (and his bacon-rubbed hair) was working his Neanderthal-hockey magic, and getting nominated for Selke trophies.

By Ian, contributing