Michael Cammalleri of the Montreal Canadiens tries to chip the puck past Erik Karlsson of the Ottawa Senators in a game at Scotiabank Place on Saturday.Phillip MacCallum/Getty Images
Life in Quebec these days has the feel of an old Charles Bronson revenge-fantasy flick.
Retribution seems to be the prevailing sentiment right at the minute.
The most talked-about movie in the province is based on a Patrick Senecal novel about a father who tortures and kills his child's murderer.
Victims' rights advocate Pierre-Hugues Boisvenu, whose daughter actually was murdered, has just been named to the Senate to vote for a crackdown on young offenders and other cretinous criminals.
The Quebec Remparts exact retribution for l'Affaire Cormier by beating the Rouyn-Noranda Huskies 7-5 a couple of day ago.
And the hockey gods - an ill-tempered and vengeful bunch who are clearly miffed at poor Tomas Plekanec - have pointed the bony finger of doom at Mike Cammalleri.
Someone is bound and determined to ruin Plekanec's contract year. First Andrei Kostitsyn is felled by a knee injury on an innocuous hit from Florida's Keith Ballard, then our boy Cammy is felled by a somewhat less innocuous hit from Anton Volchenkov.
Either way, Plekanec must be wondering what he's done to deserve this.
The good news, delivered by Cammalleri just a few minutes ago, is that the Habs' top triggerman will only miss about 15 games because of the Olympic break - he'll be out for six weeks in total.
"I guess the timing could be worse," he said. "I'm a little upset that it happened, and I'm also upset that I didn't have my guard up more."
The team was close-mouthed about the exact nature of the injury, and Cammalleri didn't want to play ball either.
FI thought we could trick him into answering by comparing it to the severity of the owie he suffered to his left knee his second in Los Angeles.
"That one was four weeks, no surgery, this one's six weeks, no surgery," he said.
Smart-arse.
Cammalleri had 11 points in the nine games before he went down, and is the team's leading five-on-five scorer.
Tonight the Habs will try to avenge a 7-1 spanking at the hands of the Canucks earlier this year with Benoit Pouliot in Cammalleri's spot on Plekanec's left and Sergei Kostistyn on the right.
Given it's Pouliot's first game with a new centre and Kostitsyn's got precisely one point in his last 18 games, this spot of revenge could be a dish served extremely cold.