Considering the unsightly (but damned catchy!) shenanigans I got up to during the lockout, I had hoped to steer clear of yoga pants for a little while. But alas, just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.

You’re looking at the window display of the Metrotown Lululemon, otherwise knows as Yoga Pants Mecca (seriously, all the yoga studios in Vancouver face it). And no, that isn’t a typo. The sign has a few extra U’s, which we’re going to assume is intentional. Take a better look at it.

They may well have been the silent majority in the past, but the seeming inevitability of a trade has brought the Roberto Luongo fans out of the woodwork. It feels like we’ve seen more ardent defence of the Canucks netminder in the past eight months than in his previous four seasons combined.

The long, drawn-out nature of the lockout has only made things harder for Luongo fans, like slowly peeling off a band-aid from a particularly hairy part of the leg. Just ripping it off in one motion is preferable: it hurts more in the moment, but the pain fades over time. Now Luongo might stay with the team for the entire season, with the expectation that he’ll be gone in the summer, which is somehow even worse. Imagine an entire season of Luongo showing Canucks fans exactly what they love about him, all the while knowing that he won’t be staying.

That’s what makes this tribute video by YouTube user RanaTA87 so appropriate. It shows Luongo in both his moments of despair and his moments of glory, his triumphs and his tragedies. Set to “One Love” by U2, it is simultaneously painfully melodramatic and just melodramatic enough.

Roberto Luongo has said a few times now — in multiple languages, at that — that he’s approaching this season like he approached the 2010 Olympics. We’ve already covered and sensationalized the nefarious undercurrent of this mindset, but on Monday night, in an interview with Ren Lavoie of French-language broadcaster RDS, the primary implication became even clearer.

“I’m willing to stay here this season because it will be short,” Luongo said, albeit in French. “But I don’t want to stay here long term.”

Luongo was quick to clarify to us that translating this quote to English transformed it into something a little more brusque than he intended. “That was taken a bit out of context,” he explained. “I said, ‘given what’s happened I don’t see myself being here long term.’ Didn’t want to make it sound like ‘Get me out of here’.

In other words, he didn’t intend to give the impression that he’s clamouring to leave. That said, given all that’s gone down, it was clear that he views his time in Vancouver as a temporary stay. He’s willing to be patient, even to the point of sticking around for the rest of the year, but he expects this chapter in his life to come to an end at some point in the near future.

As for when that day will come, however, who has any earthly clue?

With the lockout over and the Canucks’ season slated to begin January 19 at home versus the Anaheim Ducks, the roster has reassembled for a brief training camp. And, since Roberto Luongo remains on said roster, he too has had to return to Vancouver.

He did so Thursday afternoon, arriving to an airport welcoming party of reporters looking to grill him on the awkward situation. (But the most awkward situation came during the scrum, when Jason Botchford asked, “Do you think it’s been a distraction at all?” and Luongo responded, “We’ve been in a lockout, so…. in regards to what?” Awkward.)

Now, while Luongo is here for the moment, he isn’t expected to be here long. But he might be. After all, who knows with Mike “Patience is a virtue” Gillis? And if he is here for awhile yet, Luongo is willing to accept that (not that he has a choice). “Whether it’s a couple of days, a week, two weeks or the end of the season, I’m totally fine with it,” he said.

Spitballin’ (or Super Pass It To Bulis: All In, if you love adventurous acronymizing) is a feature that allows us to touch on a multitude of things really fast, because in the world of hockey, there are always lots of things to find and colour. Here are a few topics that deserve mention.

If you’ve been easing yourself back into Canucks coverage, there’s a good possibility you’ve missed something amidst the batcrap insanity that this Roberto Luongo storyline has managed to become. Yes, we’ve only been back since Sunday, but there have already been so many developments in this Snakes-and-Ladders saga that keeping track of everything is next to impossible.

It began the moment the new CBA was announced. Immediately, hockey fans and media washed their hands of that unfortunate diversion and picked right back up where we left off: speculating tirelessly on Roberto Luongo’s next destination. And I do mean tirelessly. We’ve heard a lot about the soon-to-be-announced compressed schedule, but the real story of this week has been the compressed baseless speculation. In what can only be interpreted as a collective bid by the hockey world to make up for lost wasted time, these last five days have been like an episode of American Horror Story: flashbacks; flash forwards; nuns possessed by Satan; Nazi doctors; a murderer that wears a mask made of human skin; Adam Levine; aliens; zombies; a psychotic Santa; a woman that thinks she’s Anne Frank.

All of these things and Tyler Bozak have been rumoured to be part of a package for Luongo.

When the new CBA finally gets ratified this weekend, it will reportedly include two compliance buyouts in the 2013 or 2014 off-seasons. These buyouts are designed to help teams get under the new, lower salary caps for the following seasons. The cap in 2013-14 will apparently be $64.3 million, a drop of $5.9 million from the current cap, which would potentially present a problem for those teams that spend to the cap.

Such as, for instance, the Vancouver Canucks. As is, the Canucks still have a bit of room under the revised salary cap, but have several UFAs to re-sign, the biggest being Alex Edler. The buyouts in the new CBA would give the Canucks some options for creating the necessary cap space for Edler’s raise, as well as giving them an out on any contracts that they might regret.

This brings me to something I can’t believe I actually need to say: Roberto Luongo will not be one of those buyouts.

Immediately after Tuesday night’s election was called in Barack Obama’s favour (actually, four minutes before, but who’s arguing), his Twitter account sent out a victory tweet. “Four more years”, it said, along with a photo of the President hugging his wife, Michelle. In just 22 minutes, it had been shared over 200,000 times, making it the most retweeted tweet in history. Three days later, it’s been retweeted an astounding 800,000 times. People seemed pretty into it.

That said, if you’re asking me, the tweet most deserving of an RT in the wake of Obama’s re-election win was this one, from our old pal @strombone1, a.k.a. totally Roberto Luongo:

One of the major differences between this NHL lockout and the lockouts that occurred in 2004-05 and 1994-95 is the advent of Twitter, giving teams, media, and players a direct conduit to fans. The NHLPA has encouraged their constituents to communicate their frustration with Gary Bettman and the owners through Twitter, to the point that many of the player accounts seem completely homogeneous.

There is one player’s Twitter account, however, that will always be completely and utterly unique: strombone1. The all-but-verified account of a certain French-Italian-Canadian netminder for the Vancouver Canucks is an endless source of bizarre non-sequiturs , love for reality TV, and an obsession for literal toilet humour, generally at his own expense.

No other NHL player would start a hashtag full of terrible pickup lines entirely making fun of himself. The pseudonym’d Roberto Luongo distracted hockey fans nation-wide from the lockout with the #StrombonePickupLines hashtag and the results are ridiculous, hilarious, and frequently filthy. Be forewarned.

By now, you could probably publish an anthology of the digital ink that’s been spilled speculating on Roberto Luongo’s next destination, and not just some sissy course-pack. This thing would rival the Norton Shakespeare with the writing of Thomas Drance alone — in the past month, at that.

Yeah, we’re still talking about Funny Bob. If you thought that the expiration of the collective bargaining agreement and the delay in getting a new one might put this topic on the back burner — especially since it’s literally impossible for Luongo to be traded right now — think again. Last week, John Shannon got things started right back up by saying that a deal to the Toronto Maple Leafs “done”.

What he meant, since he’s as aware as anybody that you can’t trade players without a CBA and hockey totally doesn’t have one of those right now, was that it’s “all but done”. I spoke to him on the phone over the weekend, and he clarified: “Here’s what I truly believe: with the information that I have, once the collective bargaining agreement is done and all the rules and regulations are in place, that a deal between Brian Burke and the Canucks will be made.”

Mike Gillis has since issued a full denial of Shannon’s report, but Shannon stuck to his guns in a Sportsnet piece over the weekend. Granted, this line tripped me up somewhat:

“I do not know who or what [Luongo] will be traded for, and believe it or not, I don’t think general managers Mike Gillis and Brian Burke know either. The rules of any new collective bargaining agreement will dictate the actual transaction.”

In other words, the deal is only all but done in the sense that it’s not done at all? Right on.

Gillis and Burke are negotiating, though, and I would suggest that the last five days aren’t just evidence of that — they are that. This deal, like the CBA, is being negotiated in public.

Here’s yet another reason that the NHL lockout needs to end right the heck now: the labour stoppage has robbed us of the glorious ending to the Roberto Luongo saga. It’s completely unfair and borderline torture to be left hanging in this way, like AMC making Breaking Bad fans wait a full year for the second half of season 5.

But, like that Youtube guy that perfectly predicted the season 4 finale, Sportsnet’s John Shannon claims to have figured out how this whole ordeal ends. On Wednesday, in a televised discussion with Nick Kypreos, Shannon said that the Canucks had a Luongo deal in place with the Toronto Maple Leafs, and the only thing holding up the deal is that, thanks to the lockout, Luongo doesn’t currently play for them.

Supposing the NHL’s current proposal is accepted and the season begins next month, Shannon had the following to say: “‘Roberto Luongo is staying in Canada, and will be a Toronto Maple Leaf by November 2nd.”

After the NHL faced the PR disaster of their market research focus group documents going public on Monday, they needed to do something quick to fix their image among hockey fans. The announcement of a new, seemingly reasonable CBA proposal with the aim of saving full 82-game season? That ought to do it.

While there is still a lot of work to be done in negotiations and time will tell how truly reasonable the offer is, the fact remains that this is the first real glimmer of hope that a deal could get done in time to save the 2012-13 season. The key for the owners, however, is that this offer is contingent on a deal being reached within the next 9-10 days, as they want a full 82-game season and all the revenue that entails.

In order to cram all those games in, the NHL schedule would need to get a lot more compressed, meaning more back-to-back games, more fatigue, and more risk of injuries.

Which means Mike Gillis might not want to trade Roberto Luongo after all.

Spitballin’ (or Super Pass It To Bulis: All In, if you love adventurous acronymizing) is a feature that allows us to touch on a multitude of things really fast, because in the world of hockey, there are always lots of things to find and colour. Here are a few quick topics.

Back in April, not long after the Canucks had been eliminated from the postseason by the Los Angeles Kings, it hit people that the Roberto Luongo era was truly over and fan tributes began to pop up. The best one was probably “Live Forever”, a moving, morose video exclamation on Luongo’s chapter in Vancouver that even Luongo himself claimed made him teary-eyed.

There two things that made that video so effective: the first was our relative certainty that Luongo was truly gone. He’ll be moved at the draft, we thought. Maybe August. It made it a lot easier to say goodbye when he was, you know, going. The second was song choice. Drew Holcomb’s “Live Forever” shaped the mood perfectly.

But let’s imagine that Luongo’s supposed trade had failed to materialize for so long that the whole ordeal had just gotten silly, and all our raw emotion and heartfelt goodbyes had curdled into jaded irony. And let’s imagine the tribute video featured a less effective, slightly cheesier tune, like, say, One Republic and Timbaland’s “Apologize”

Actually, let’s not imagine. That video exists now.

In case you haven’t heard, the NHL collective bargaining agreement expired at 9pm PST on Saturday night, meaning the second work stoppage in seven years is officially upon us. (Alert status: complete despair.) No games have been canceled yet, but the lockout is already beginning to affect things. On Monday, a handful of Canucks skated at UBC with their practice jerseys turned inside-out. After all, they aren’t employees of the Canucks right now. Horrifying.

And that wasn’t the only tangible impact the lockout had on the Canucks’ unemployed hockey players. With no training staff around to keep an eye on the clock, Kevin Bieksa’s parking meter expired. He returned to his car to discover he’d been busted by officer 300, the Judge Dredd of parking services officers. Bieksa now has until the end of the month to pay the $30 ticket before it doubles to $60. Will this wreak havoc on his lockout preparation fund?

Yeah, he can probably afford it, which means there isn’t much of a story here. It’s a shame his violation was 11b (expired meter), and not, say, violation 13g (nuisance) or violation 7k (counterfeit pass). I mean, that would have at least made things interesting.

But what we lack in one quality parking story we can more than make up for in quantity. This is, after all, just the latest in a long line of parking incidents for members of the Vancouver Canucks. Come with us as we park multiple times on memory lane.

Last week, Shane Doan made a solemn vow that he would sign somewhere by midnight on September 15th, although his recent history of extended deadlines made us wonder if this was an empty threat.

Turns out it was. According to a recent report by John Gambadoro, a radio host on Sports 620 KTAR in Phoenix, Doan has once again spurned his own deadline. But here’s the twist: the winger has actually moved it ahead for once. Gambadoro says that Doan will sign somewhere by 2pm on September 14th. What’s more, “somewhere” is one of only two places: Phoenix… or Vancouver. (Hey! that’s where we live!)

We’ve been real Debbie Downers about the Canucks’ chances thus far, but if Gambadoro’s report is to be believed, you sort of have to like them now. After all, Doan has said that he needs Greg Jamison’s deal with the city of Glendale to go through before he signs that four-year deal with the Coyotes, but what are the odds of that deal getting completed tomorrow? Heck, the last time someone successfully completed a deal to purchase the Coyotes was in 2005.

Spitballin’ (or Super Pass It To Bulis: All In, if you love adventurous acronymizing) is a feature that allows us to touch on a multitude of things really fast, because in the world of hockey, there are always lots of things to find and colour. Here are a few quick topics.

Mike Gillis may have a Twitter account, but he’s not exactly active. Prior to today, he hadn’t tweeted for 5 months. Before that, there was a 4-month gap. His tweets are generally perfunctory, safe, and uninteresting. While he promised to be “active and update every few days” with his first tweet back on November 10, 2010, he has a grand total of 53 tweets in over one and a half years.

His Twitter account isn’t exactly a must-follow, is what I’m saying. But today he had something interesting to say that every Canucks fan wanted to hear: the Canucks and Cory Schneider have agreed to a new contract.

After the NHL Draft came and went without a Roberto Luongo trade, the waters were temporarily calm on that front. Then came Aaron Portzline of the Columbus Dispatch to create some waves Monday morning by claiming that Luongo had invoked his No Trade Clause to avoid being traded to the Blackhawks or the Leafs and that his preferred location was a return to the Florida Panthers.

Needles to say, this caused what is known in technical terms as a kerfuffle.

Pass it to Comics is a regular collaboration between PITB and cartoonist Chloe Ezra, whose Tumblr page, Blue Soup, is a must-follow for any Canuck fan with an appreciation for quirk. Today, Roberto Luongo is the victim of a misunderstanding.

Just three days ago, Roberto Luongo indicated that he would be willing to waive his no trade clause, if he was asked to. I thought this was a mature, magnanimous response that was a further indication of his professionalism, but didn’t think much else would come of it. It was good to know that he wouldn’t hold the team hostage if they found the right deal, but to me it didn’t mean all that much.

It didn’t mean that Gillis had asked him to waive his no trade clause, nor did it mean that Gillis would ask him to do so. I certainly didn’t think it meant that Luongo himself would ask for a trade.

According to reports, however, that’s exactly what he did. Nick Kypreos reported that Luongo said in his exit meeting that he wanted out, while James Duthie and Dan Murphy started tweeting teams that were on Luongo’s list of eligible bachelors. It was a startling revelation that Mike Gillis denied, albeit weakly. So, unless the reports are erroneous or some sort of ploy, it seems that we already have the answer as to which of the Canucks’ two very good goaltenders will be traded.

But I have to admit that I do have one big concern about keeping Cory Schneider rather than Luongo. The issue is fairly simple: there have been a lot of young goaltenders in the NHL that have experienced tremendous success in their first full season in the league, then faltered badly afterwards.

Alain Vigneault announced this morning what everyone already expected: Cory Schneider will start in the Canucks’ must-win game four in Los Angeles. While he faced fewer shots in Sunday’s game three than Roberto Luongo faced in games one or two, the fact remains that Schneider allowed just one goal, played solid, and deserves the chance to repeat his performance.

I’m thrilled for Schneider, who has had a phenomenal season, finishing second in the league in save percentage and third in goals against average, with a 20-8-1 record. He’s hard-working, has a great personality, and has been an exceptional teammate, so it’s great to see him rewarded. At least, it’s mostly great.

For the same reason that it’s been hard to enjoy his success this season, it’s hard to enjoy seeing him rewarded, because every success for Schneider has been treated like a failure for Luongo.

Now, despite plenty of convincing evidence, we can’t say for certain that @strombone1 is the Twitter account of one Roberto Luongo, but this no doubt how the Canucks’ netminder prefers it. Considering the way Canuck fans treat him these days, not to mention the way they chased Mike Duco off Twitter, or the horrible, misogynistic garbage they said to Theo Fleury and, more recently, Brittany Carnegie, you can understand why Luongo might choose to keep his Twitter account shrouded in mystery.

It’s also just funnier that way, and Luongo knows it.

Despite months of superb goaltending, some fans just don’t seem willing to cut Roberto Luongo any slack. His (and the team’s) rough start against the Sabres on Saturday reignited the old goaltender debate in some corners. Heck, it didn’t even take a bad start by Luongo for the Team 1040 to ask which goaltender should get the start in the playoffs in their daily poll question just over a week ago.

On Saturday I wrote a post about how our perception of players changes the more we see them. Because Luongo gets more starts than Schneider and has been playing in Vancouver for a longer period of time, Canucks fans are far more aware of his flaws than they are of Schneider’s. But that argument likely won’t sway everyone, which means it’s time for something more flashy and visually stimulating.

It’s time for a fan video. Fortunately for us, KingOfTheIce71 made a great one.

One of the main reasons I love sports is that they have the power to surprise. The absurd and unexpected are almost commonplace in sports, particularly in a fast-paced and chaotic sport like hockey. Roberto Luongo provided one of those absurd and unexpected moments on Tuesday against the Nashville Predators.

I expected much more fuss to be made of his incredible save on Colin Wilson, but it seems to have passed by largely unnoticed. In my mind, it’s the save of the season.

I honestly don’t have much to say about it. It was so flabbergasting a save that I can only point at it repeatedly while saying, “Look! See? Do you see it?”