A few summers ago, some buddies and I spent some time in Europe. France, Spain, Ireland, a few other places.

We did it all. Ate the food. Drank the wine. Tried (some days more successfully than others) to woo foreign girls with cute accents back to our hostel. Stayed up too late and got up too early. Saw famous monuments and nude beaches. You name it, we did it.

But what I remember more than anything from that summer was the Euro Cup. Basically, for those of you who might not know, the Euro Cup is the European soccer championship, an event that happened to be taking place at the exact time we were there. In some countries, it's even a bigger deal than the World Cup. No seriously.

It didn't matter if you were in Spain for an Italy-Holland match, or in Holland for Portugal-Turkey. Everyone was on the edge of their seats, glued to the TV, every time a game was on. Period.

When the Germans met Spain in the final, by sheer coincidence, me and my buddies happened to be in Germany. It was awesome, and even now, two years after the fact, I still can’t completely describe the atmosphere that night.  Maybe a little bit Mardi Gras and part World Cup, with some strong German beer and pretty flashing ladies thrown in. Young and old, rich and poor, doctors and lawyers, they all mixed in the streets of Munich that night. It didn't matter who you were, or what side of town you were from. That night all that mattered was that everyone was German. And it was surreal.

When I got back to the States a few weeks later, I tried to explain to everyone what I'd been a part of that night. The sounds. The smells. The tension of thousands of people swaying second to second. But nobody understood.

I mean, it wasn't really their fault, how could they understand? This wasn't Yankees-Red Sox, Lakers-Celtics, or the SEC Championship football game in Atlanta, it was so much more. Imagine if the Indianapolis Colts were in the Super Bowl this past February, playing…Japan. Weird, I know, but whether you love Peyton Manning or not, who would you be rooting for? Now multiply that by 10, and you’ve got the Euro Cup.

Sunday’s Gold Medal hockey game was the Euro Cup on skates. I'm not one for hyperbole, but this was the first sporting event of my lifetime that truly brought our country together.

With all the work I’ve doing to get this website up and running, I haven’t been able to do much, well, writing.

It’s time for me to jump back into the game, but of course I picked arguably the worst weekend in sports- you know, the one before the Super Bowl- to do so. And with both the NBA and college basketball seasons still in the middle stages, I wasn’t sure where I’d go or what I’d write about.

And then it happened. Through some nifty internet investigation, I found out that the NHL is hosting its All-Star game this weekend. As those old Guinness commercials used to say “brilliant!”

Not only do I actually enjoy watching hockey, but the league makes for some of the easiest comedic fodder since Kevin Federline entered our lives a few years back.

To get the journalistic juices flowing, I figured what better way to start than to keep my first ever running diary of the event in honor of course, of ESPN.com’s Bill Simmons.

Without further adu, the 2009 NHL All-Star Game diary: