Happy Birthday To Us.

Four years ago today we printed our first-ever issue of the gamd day paper. It was for a game against Detroit and the banner headline on the front said, "Satan Has A Hockey Team!" It was 24 pages and featured the first (and only) appearance of what was supposed to be an every-issue column under the heading of "The Rink Rat's Rant"; a column about the prospects that was not written by our own GT Prospect Department, but rather by someone else; a couple stories about the NHL's new rules and about the passing of Bob Broeg by Chris Gift (though not under the now firmly-established The Five Hole"); and some truly horrendous formatting.

We also learned an important lesson about headlines: Jokes about Satan make people think you're peddling religious materials.

Many thanks to everyone who bought that first issue and still stuck with us after that, and many thanks to everyone who works so hard on our little paper and it's sister, this smart-mouth site. Four years and now into our fifth season of bitching about Blues hockey, happy birthday to you all.

As a way to give back a little bit to our loyal readers, we have a birthday present for all of you. Thanks to the donation of our own DanGNR we have two tickets for Tuesday's game against Vancouver. They are upstairs seats, but you beggars know not to be choosers, right?

Birthday Contest:

Want to win the two tickets to the game? Email your most creative story about either:

1. Why the Blues are struggling right now
2. What the Blues can do to break out of their slump

And the most creative and/or humorous story out of the bunch gets published here on the ssite, possibly in Tuesday's issue of Game Time and you win the two seats. Notice that the emphasis is on creative and/or humorous, so if you send in simply "Brewer sucks and Andy Murray should be fired" you won't win. If, however, you come up with something unique and print-worthy, they shall be yours.

Deadline is going to have to be Sunday night at 5 p.m. Central so do not dilly-dally. Send your submissions to gallagher@stlouisgametime.com and we'll judge them. The format can be whatever works best for your story: Word documents, pictures and text, a video you shot, whatever. Any questions? Leave 'em in the comments.

Happy birthday to us, happy birthday to you all.