I got into a debate on Facebook a few weeks back on whether it’s OK to have a second-favorite team in any given sport. This is particularly relevant for me these days.

While the Penguins are hockey team No. 1 for me, I’ve had a bizarre second-favorite thing going for the Chicago Blackhawks since I was ten. Though I had nothing to do with Chicago until college, this random second-place fandom was due to an older kid I knew liking them and the fact that, unlike Pittsburgh, Chicago was a playable team in Blades of Steel. (At least an 8-bit, gray-and-red team called “Chicago” was playable.)

(I realize I sound like a Cubs pink-hat using some forgotten trip to a great-aunt in Skokie at age 4 to justify getting hammered at Wrigley, but I’m for real in not being bandwagon. Ask G, considering I used to drag her to games in the Bill-Wirtz-era 2000s, when the Blackhawks truly sucked.)

With the Pens eliminated two rounds ago, I’ve been hoping for a Chicago Stanley Cup. I say having a second-favorite team in sports is OK, so long as you follow these rules:

1. There’s an unquestionable hierarchy of Nos. 1 and 2. You can’t go mixing things, or you’ll get in trouble if the two teams play each other. What did I do when Pittsburgh played Chicago in the 1992 Cup finals? Dropped the Chicago sympathies faster than BP’s stock price yesterday.
2. Your No. 2 can’t be a historic, regional or otherwise bitter rival of No. 1. Chicago and Pittsburgh rarely play each other, so I’m good here. You can never, ever like your favorite team’s archrival. If Baltimore gave me a key to the city and renamed itself Patstackiswesomeville, I would go buy one of those window stickers with Calvin peeing on the Ravens logo and tattoo it to my face just to make sure everyone knew how I really felt. (Luckily the first one will never happen, because that would be a pretty awful tattoo. The point is, Ravens suck.)
3. You can’t be elated if your No. 2 wins, just happy. Elation is saved for No. 1 only. If a No. 1 championship is “OMG AWSUM!!!1!”, then a No. 2 championship is, “Hey, alright, I like it.” No couch-burning or things like that allowed when it’s not your true favorite.
4. No. 2 fandom is usually preferable if your No. 2 is in the city where you currently live. You get the benefit of a happy populace, which means happy neighbors. But per Rule No. 3, don’t think you are allowed the same enjoyment as the true natives.
5. Temporary No. 2s are perfectly OK when No. 2 is playing a team you hate. The Blackhawks get to embarrass the Flyers? Double win!

So there you have it. In conclusion, I would like to say Go ‘Hawks (with no exclamation point, per Rule No. 3) and Ravens suck. Thank you.

• At first today, it really annoyed me that the entire media-swilling world spent the day rending its garments and pulling out its hair over Michael Jackson. (It’s 10 p.m. here, and the funeral is still the top story on CNN.com.) But then I thought, “Parts of the U.S. have been doing this for more than 30 years for Elvis, so this is really nothing new,” and I felt better about our modern era — or worse about past eras, I can’t decide.

• I’ve been asking people for a percentage: how many people watching Michael Jackson’s funeral know who Robert McNamara is, and they have to understand that he was far more historically important than MJ. The common response is less than 1 percent, but I would think it’s actually up around 4 percent. Call me an optimist.

In fairness to that other 96 percent, I did call him “George McNamara” at lunch today. But to burnish my own history-nerd credentials with an even bigger bit of nerdness, I was also thinking of McGeorge Bundy at the time.

• Key line from this good budget deficit rundown:

If policy now tilts too far toward deficit cutting, some argue, that would treat job creation as an option the nation somehow cannot afford, in contrast to “must haves” like tax cuts for wealthy Americans and unpopular foreign military entanglements.

True, but you also can’t ignore the fact that those tax cuts and unpopular entanglements were put in place, and now they are indeed making the job creation that much more financially difficult. I fall reluctantly in line with the spending advocates — I don’t think now is the time to pay down the deficit, because government spending at the moment really is a big portion of the money flowing into the economy. But if things do turn around, raise my taxes. It sucks, but it’s better than betting our economic livelihood on the whim of the Chinese government.

And on to frivolous stuff:

• I’m sorry to see the Penguins lose Rob Scuderi to the L.A. Kings, but they were right not to pay what the Kings paid. The dude is good, but not $13.6 million good.

• I got a Lollapalooza ticket for Sunday, August 9, hombres. Jane’s Addiction original lineup? I am hella there.

• This past Friday I went to see The Hangover. Verdict: four phats. Definitely some gross humor; definitely a weird Zach Galifinakis; and most likely worth seeing. (Though don’t take your parents.)

Even stranger, the movie featured both Heather Graham and Mike Tyson in prominent roles. Why is this strange? Those two were both guests at a 2004 arts-benefit party at the Guggenheim in NYC attended by yours truly, who by all rights should not have been there in the first place. (I’m pretty sure this Heather Graham photo is from that very night.) Mike Tyson is somehow even scarier when he wears fur, and I even made eye contact with Ms. Graham — or as I have no right to call her, Heather — for a full second.

The moral here? I really should have been offered at least a cameo appearance as the third part of that party trifecta, Hollywood.

Pittsburgh loves you, 2009!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Let’s Go Pens.

I tuned in for periods 2 and 3 of today’s NHL Winter Classic game, which saw Chicago get destroyed by the Red Wings in a comeback victory. (The Red Wings are always pulling this garbage against my favorite teams. Jagoffs.) The game didn’t have quite the finish that last year did, and I naturally wasn’t as invested without the Pens playing, but the ‘Hawks have long been my second-favorite team (years before I had ever thought of going to school in Chicago) and so it was good to see the game played just a mile up the road from our place.

In any event, I’m mad geeked about the fact that the Winter Classic is turning into the first hockey success story in years. This year gets an A for weather and an A for the matchup and team effort, but a B- overall because the Penguins weren’t playing and Detroit won. Those are both ridiculous reasons to downgrade the game, but then this blog exists at my beck and call, so you’re out of luck in your efforts to hate on my conclusion.

Bonus Sarah Palin note: I meant to write during the election that while the G.O.P., the American populace and the human race didn’t get much out of the idea of hockey mom Sarah Palin as VP, the NHL certainly did: For the first time in a nation where no-talent sportswriters have made hockey the go-to sport of ridicule, the same voters who treat sports that aren’t baseball or football as pastimes for gay foreign terrorists were defending hockey with all their American-purist might.

While I’m glad Palin has turkey-trotted off the national stage for now, I really miss that brief period when even Southern rednecks were touting hockey as a game played by Real Americans™.

And now, back to obscurity.

• I believe that even if I supported anything about Sarah Palin, I’d still be really sick of seeing her everywhere I turn. Conservatives would compare Palin’s star power to Obama, but Obama’s ascent took a good two years and wasn’t compressed into a two-week news cycle. He’s also one of the two people actually running for president.
• Another Palin-borne irony: after years of ignorant sports commentators decrying hockey as “not a real sport”, it’s now somehow true that being peripherally involved with organized hockey (even at the little-kid level) is considered a solid qualification for the Presidency of the United States. The NHL’s marketing department needs to jump on this with the quickness.
• Part of the reason I was excited to get to the University of Michigan this year was the chance to go to a school with a real football program. Nevermind my conflicted loyalties from being born in Columbus and having attending another Big Ten school; this was supposed to be my chance to claim a piece of the action as the Wolverines crushed all opponents. Instead I get games like this, this and also this (which, though a win, was most unimpressive.)

  Northwestern, meanwhile, is 3-0.

  Bastards.

• While searching for a sound effect that would convey Michigan football’s limpness, I did manage to get seriously geeked from this:

  ↑ ↑ ↓ ↓ ← → ← → B A what.

• Congrats to my cousin Dante and his wife Kari on their new son (and, simultaneously, their anniversary), who was born just this morning and is the first of the new generation in my family. Pitt, you just gained another fan.

What a bummer. They went down fighting to the very final seconds–I did the two-handed hair-grab and futile stare at the sky as the puck rolled past Osgood and across the goal mouth–but Detroit has just been too overwhelming this series. I haven’t seen stifling defense like that since the New Jersey trap era.

Props to you, Penguins, for a mad phat season and for never giving up. And please re-sign Brooks Orpik and anybody else you can. Orpik played his ass off and we’ll miss anybody else who goes.

Also, Zetterberg for the Conn Smythe is ridiculous. I would have chosen Osgood, Franzen, Holstrom or Lidstrom first.

Now back to our regularly scheduled non-sports blogging until football season rolls around.

You know, I was all set to write the Pens’ obituary, and yet I should not have given up on those Frenchies Maxime and Marc-André. And, of course, Sykora with calling the goal. The whole thing was the shiznit.

Now they need to avoid coming back and blowing Game 6 by 8-0 or something.

And sorry to my new neighbors for bringing the celebratory ruckus.

I can barely even watch this, dudes. There are a few too many spectacular saves for comfort.

The crowd enthusiasm coming through tonight was amazing. I wanted to jump through my TV screen and beat up an octopus.