Surely, that's got to be it!

One thing you can count on with Sens fans: they hate Bob Cole.

While everyone can see that Cole lost his fastball years ago, most hockey fans still view him in that affectionate Pat Sumerall/Vin Scully sort of way. Not Sens fans. They hate the guy.

This all dates back to the height of Battle of Ontario. As with absolutely everything else that's ever happened to the team, this little fued was motivated by Sens fans' extreme paranoia that somebody, somewhere, might like the Leafs better. This is a city that once passed a real bylaw to ban the wearing of Leaf jerseys.

In this case, they convinced themselves that Bob Cole was a secret Leafs fan because he always yelled louder about Leaf goals than Sens goals.

It didn't help when you pointed out that maybe, just possibly, that had something to do with the fact that every Leaf goal was accompanied by really loud crowd noise (in both rinks) and Sens' goals weren't. Remember, these guys think 1927 was more recent than 1967. Logic isn't a strong point.

Add in the fact that Cole occasionally committed the unforgivable sin of mixing up completely unsimilar names like Alfredsson and Arvedson, and Sens fans were ready to declare war. Whenever the most diehard of Sens fans (i.e. the media) would mention Cole, you could count on the calls for the Canadian icon to be dumped by the CBC.

Sens fans would regularly refer to Cole and partner Harry Neale as Leafs homers, and would brag that they'd turn down the volume on CBC games and listen to Dean Brown on the radio insted.

I'll repeat that: Sens fans believed that the antidote to mindless homerism was to listen to Dean Brown.

In any event, when the CBC finally decided to pull the plug on Cole as the #1 play-by-play man and relegate him to secondary games this year, Ottawa fans were ready to take the streets in celebration.

Until last night.

Say, if Bob Cole isn't the lead announcer anymore, and only gets to do secondary games... and the Senators are usually the secondary game because everyone else still wants to watch the Leafs... then that would mean that the play-by-play on most Sens games will be done by...

Oh baby! We should have thought this through!