The ice was swinging more than the Ray Brown-Ed Thigpen version of the Oscar Peterson Trio at this week's Scotties Tournament of Hearts, which made for some great shots, a lot of anxious moments and a ton of quizzical looks on the faces of Canada's best female curlers.
Curling leaves lots of people cold and confused but I must confess that I am a closet fan, who finds the game addictive and even compelling lots of times.
In the depths of winter, a week listening to Vic and Linda and Ray do the round-robin on TSN and then turn it over to the CBC crew for the weekend semis and finals is just what the doctor ordered.
Thank goodness this ritual has now been reinstated after the debacle CBC made of broadcasting the round robin on Country Canada, which used to be the name of a good TV show on the national network and is now apparently the name of a digital channel to which only cows subscribe.
In any event, the curling this week from Regina, a curling town if there ever was one, was uniformly fun to watch. It was a very strong field with lots of different personalities.
Kelly Scott and Team Canada, who had been incredibly steady for two years, never got going and were out of it before it began.
Quebec's young guns skipped by Marie-France Larouche look like high schools kids who can't believe the adults would invite them to such a big party. They enjoy every minute, even the bad misses, which they chuckle at. And by the way, the double-raise takeout sounds a lot sexier en francais.
Shannon Kleibrink, our Olympic bronze medalist and Sherry Middaugh were the top two finishers, playing the exciting rocks-in-play-all-over-the-place brand of game all week. Then when they got to the playoffs, they inexplicably started their games by playing the wide-open style that almost ruined the game before the four-rock rule came into effect.
Both Middaugh and Kleibrink had the hammer in the semis and finals but, instead of going after Jennifer Jones and her Manitoba team, they bored us for two ends. Both of them ended up with nose-hits to take a single point and lose the advantage of the hammer they'd worked all week to gain.
Go figure.
There's probably no other team game where the pressure weighs so heavily on the team leader as curling, where all of the team's effort so often come down to the last throw by the skip.
It's probably no accident that the losers of both the semi and final were the women who had to throw the last shots. They were similar raise-takeouts that Middaugh and Kleibrink had generally made all week. But they didn't couldn't quite make them when everything was on the line.
Curling is so much fun to watch because you see the strategies developed, amended and dropped right before your eyes shot after shot. It is the ultimate Monday morning quarterbacking and the commentators and viewers can join in with glee.
There are often a lot of helpful fingerprints on our TV screen after a particularly good game — where we have helpfully pointed out exactly where the teams should be hitting and rolling.
One thing noticed this week was that the longer teams stand around and chat about which shot they should try, the less likely they are to actually make it.
It may still be the roaring game when the stone is sliding down the ice, but it is the respectful game when it stops.
The players are invariably polite to their opponents and the celebrations and tears usually come after the handshakes, not before. So Canadian, eh?
One thing we have to hope is that curling doesn't get fashionable, as happened to skating a few years ago when it nearly died of overexposure.
There is a big storm cloud on the curling horizon for sure.
You've undoubtedly heard that a new reality TV show is in the works with closet curlers Bruce Springsteen and Jon Bon Jovi ready to climb into the hack and skip celebrity teams.
Yes, get ready for The Boss' Tenth Avenue Freeze shot. We can only hope they have a set of rocks in Asbury Park that were born to run.
Could put a whole new twist on the TV term "May Sweeps."