Happy Blog Birthday! Battle of California starts its senior year.

This was a hasty effort -- I'll do a proper blog-birthday cartoon for the sidebar later.

Woo hoo!  Blog birthday!  Sorry, Mr. Lincoln, but I'm in a speech-stealing mood today:

Four score and seven years ago, our blogfather brought forth on this internet a new hockey blog, conceived in imitation, and dedicated to the proposition that all NHL rivalries are created equal, regardless of time zone.

Now we are engaged in an era of old-vs-new media, testing whether this website, or any blog so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.  We are hockey fans from a non-hockey state met on a common blog of this vast internet.  We have come to dedicate a portion of this cyberspace as a tribute for Kings, Sharks, and Ducks who gave portions of their playing careers that this rivalry might live.  It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate…we cannot consecrate…we cannot hallow…this site.  The brave players, current and former, who skated here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract.  The world will little note nor long remember what we write here, but it can never forget the rivalry they built here. 

It is for us, the BoC fans, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which traditional sports journalism thus far so nobly advanced.  It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us…that from this great rivalry we take increased devotion to that cause for which the players gave their last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these franchises shall not have hated each other in vain; that this blog, under SBNation, shall have a new birth of silliness and cynicism; and that idiocy of the fans, by the fans, for the fans, shall not perish from the internet.

So say we all.

Yes, four years to the day after James Mirtle started this mock-Battle-of-Alberta knockoff, we somehow haven't had our internet privileges revoked just yet.  A tremendous thanks to everyone who has written for this website -- Rudy, Chen, PJ, Meg, Cheechew, O'Brien, and even occasionally Mirtle himself.  And of course a special thanks to the readers, commenters, and fellow bloggers -- this really wouldn't work without your voices in the mix.  Thanks to SB Nation for continuing to support us -- the community-based platform works really well.  And heck -- thanks to old-school journalists, too; I'm glad I'm not responsible for breaking any news.

It's the start of BoC's senior year -- let the slacking begin! 

Oh yeah, and go Mom.