Aaron Rome was a divisive figure during his three seasons as a Vancouver Canuck. The depth defenceman didn’t do any one thing particularly well, save skipping pucks off the glass like he was throwing rocks at a lake on its side, so when he found himself in the lineup in place of the highly-toued, highly-paid, and costly to acquire Keith Ballard, people got upset. But, apart from the outrage over who he tended to replace, Rome was rarely noticeable in the Canucks’ lineup.

That is, apart from when he scored a goal. It happened five times in a Canucks’ uniform, and each one was met with surprise and amusement, like when a toddler does a somersault. Three of those goals took place during a brief hot streak last November, immediately after returning from a broken hand suffered in the preseason. It was must-see TV. While culturing a fabulous Movember duster, the defenceman suddenly looked like an offensive dynamo (and Wario). For a week, Rome was the man of the hour.

He’s gone now, having signed a three-year, $4.5 million contract with the Dallas Stars, but we’ll always have November. And also that one he scored in February. Here are all 4 goals Aaron Rome scored last season.

Through the first three months of the season, Cody Hodgson had done some good work unmaking his unfair reputation among fans as a draft bust. But it wasn’t until January that he earned a new, sexier, unfair reputation. In the first month of 2012, Hodgson capitalized on some advantageous adjustments made in his usage with 6 goals, 4 assists, and a rookie of the month award.

Later we would learn that the Canucks had made some adjustments to his deployment in an effort to pump up his trade value, a move that clearly worked. In fact, it worked too well, as his performance in January turned his fans into full-blown cultists. His trade in February shocked and confused everyone — I mean, how can you trade the one true god?

But even those of us who weren’t building a spaceship to Blisstonia were baffled. We tried our best to make sense of the reasoning behind the trade and eventually came to accept it with a few reservations, but at the time, it was hard to imagine anyone ever considering moving this guy out of town. Watching the back half of Hodgson’s 16 goals will take you back to that time.

On Wednesday, we looked at the first seven goals of Henrik’s 2011-12 season and noted that they weren’t particularly wizardous. Well, don’t worry folks. Henrik just saved all the magic for part two. There are some absolute beauties in this batch of seven, including arguably the best goal of the season. Even the ugly rebound goals are beatified in some way.

Henrik gets a lot of flack for not scoring more often, most of it undeserved considering his role as a playmaker, but these goals makes me wish that he did score more often: they’re just so dang pretty. I want him to score like this all the time.

The wonderful thing about looking at all the goals scored by a single player over the course of the season is that the tendencies that emerge will sometimes surprise you. Last year, I was surprised to see that Henrik’s goals were far more aesthetically pleasing than Daniel’s goals. While Daniel had the quantity, Henrik had the quality, which legitimately caught me off guard.

This last season, both the quality and the quantity dropped off for Henrik. He scored 14 goals during the 2011-12 campaign, his lowest total in five seasons, with many of them being ugly rebounds and deflections where he was just in the right spot at the right time. That’s not to say that there was no wizardry to any of his goals this season, just that there was often a gap in between the wizardry and the goal that was filled with ugly.

There’s definitely something to be said for ugly goals, of course, which is why I’m about to say something about the first 7 goals of Henrik Sedin’s 2011-12 season.

There are some people who were put on this Earth by God to score goals in hockey. Andrew Alberts is not one of those people. Alberts’ purpose in hockey is tied to his size. Because he’s 6’5″ and weighs 215+ lbs, he’s expecting to throw punishing hits and clear out crease crashers. As a stay-at-home defender, he’s expected to use his reach to take away the opponents’ space to maneuver and cut off passing lanes. When he’s at his best, he should be unnoticeable except for the opposition forwards lying in his wake.

Thing is, when you’re a kid playing road hockey, you seldom dream about making the game-winning pokecheck. You don’t give the running play-by-play of your perfect gap control. More than anything else, you dream about scoring the big goal. I’m guessing Alberts was the same way, but things don’t always turn out the way we hope.

But in two games this season, Alberts got to live that dream. While he only scored 2 goals, they were both gamewinners. For once, Alberts was the noticeable hero. Here are those two goals.

Through the first two games of this series, Pekka Rinne has seemed as unbeatable as Contra without the Konami Code. His Halak-ian performance has Canucks fans flipping pools, pressing panic buttons, and somehow blaming Luongo. With only two goals against the Finnish sensation, the Canucks are likely scratching their heads trying to figure out what it takes to get past his event horizon glove. They don’t need to look far. In round one, Rinne was more sieve than sensation, as the Anaheim Ducks scored 20 goals in their 6 game series, averaging 3.33 goals per game. Rinne’s save percentage was an unflattering .883. How did they do it? Through the magic of online highlights, I can show you!