Detroit Free Press

He is the wildest of wild cards, the guy with a wand instead of a stick, the one man on the ice who makes the ...

Itook off my jacket. I emptied my pants pockets. I put the bag on the conveyer belt.I walked through. Beeeeep. "Step over there," the security man ordered. "Wait for someone to wand you."Ah. I slapped my forehead. My glasses. In my jacket pocket."It's these," I said, waving the glasses. "Can I put them through? I'm sure I won't beep then.""NO, SIR," he barked. "You only get one chance!""But if I don't beep without the glasses, isn't it the same as . . .""You only get one chance!"

DENVER -- Last year, at about this time, Fredrik Olausson was in a hospital bed in Bern, Switzerland, with a ruptured spleen. The idea of scoring an overtime goal in the Western Conference finals was as likely as his getting up and doing the rumba.But time passes and things change, and here he was, one year later, on Wednesday night, in overtime, taking a pass in from Steve Yzerman and lining up a big slap shot that somehow did what all the other great Detroit shots could not do on this night -- got past Colorado's Patrick Roy.

DENVER -- Brendan Shanahan stood alone in his street clothes near the lower seats of the Pepsi Center. He watched ...

FRISCO, Colo. -- Chris Drury faked out Jiri Fischer, faked out Dominik Hasek, shot the puck, won the game . . . ...

It is not his favorite subject. When you remind Kris Draper that this blood-feud rivalry between Detroit and Colorado really began with him, six years ago, when he was cheap-shotted into the boards by Claude Lemieux and an all-out hockey war was declared, he gives a rare sarcastic response."Yeah, lucky me," he says. "I got to have my face rearranged to start a rivalry."The wounds have healed. The scars long since passed. And Draper would rather be singled out for something else these days. He has worked hard to make that so.

Getting kicked out of kindergarten isn't easy. A child would have to do something truly awful, right?Not necessarily. A 5-year-old girl last week didn't have to do a thing. Her mother did it for her.Or rather, her mother's job did it. Christina Silvas, a 24-year-old single mom, works as an adult dancer in Sacramento, Calif. She does it for the money.She takes a chunk of that money and pays the $400-a-month tuition for her daughter, Abigail, to attend the Capital Christian School.