Sam Donnellon

John Collins will tell you the idea grew from seeing the same picture on several walls in the NHL offices. NBC's Jon Miller, the other man credited with creating the Winter Classic, remembers watching people wrapped like fur trappers in Edmonton way back in 2003 for an outdoor NHL game between the Oilers and Canadiens and thinking, "Yankee Stadium."

But the real heroes in the amazing growth of the Winter Classic reside not in the New York offices of Collins' NHL, or cross town in the offices at 30 Rock, where Miller is a vice president of sports. No, the real heroes are the Einsteins who first invented the concept of the Bowl Championship Series, then moved their most significant games off New Year's Day, or its legal holiday equivalent.

To a league seeking to infiltrate American culture, it was the equivalent of volunteering to serve a game misconduct. Collins, 50, had barely unpacked his boxes when Miller called him with this idea he had been sitting on since he got that glimpse of the 2003 Heritage Classic, played in Edmonton between the Oilers and Canadiens in late November amid temperatures barely over freezing. That's the picture Collins kept seeing on office walls, too, specifically that of NHL deputy commissioner Bill Daly.

PHILADELPHIA -- More and more, modern sports fans are sending one unified message loud and clear: We really don't care what you do or have done or might do off the field. In most, if not all, cases, we really don't care what you do before a play, after a play or in the case of those ugly wads-of-whatever rolling around in some baseball players' mouths, what you do while playing.

"Just get him to the field on Sunday," former Eagle Hugh Douglas said Wednesday amid belly laughs. "I'll hire somebody to hold his hand all week if I have to."

PHILADELPHIA -- At 6-6, 320, Todd Herremans seems an unlikely champion for those who have been beaten and bullied.

Throw in the tiny Michigan town where he was raised, and it borders on the absurd.

But then the Eagles tackle starts talking about his February appearance on "The View," about the courage of 13-year-old Upper Darby, Pa., bully victim Nadin Khoury, and you realize the only absurdity is that organizations such as "No Place for Hate" need to exist at all.

NEWTOWN SQUARE, Pa. -- "Thank God there is ibuprofen," Tiger Woods was saying, and a little later there was this, said with enough iron to make a club:

"I'm getting pretty tired of ice."

NEW YORK -- In so many ways, the Flyers are the polar opposite of the team they were at this time last year. It's March 7, they have more points than any other team in the Eastern Conference, and only an epic collapse could keep them from playing in the postseason. They are deep, they have been comparatively injury-free, and they have been blessed with many pleasant surprises, a recurring characteristic of championship teams.

Sergei Bobrovsky, Ville Leino, the continuing emergence of Claude Giroux as one of the league's superstars, the reclamation of Danny Briere and Scott Hartnell -- about the only part that hasn't worked out better than expected is the play of Nikolai Zherdev.

So there's really no good excuse or reason for what has happened over the last nine days, and particularly Sunday. Not the bounce of the puck, slumping shooters or goalies, the flu -- not even Keith Jones' suggestion during Saturday's Comcast SportsNet telecast that officials get caught up in the chase for the final playoff spots and unduly punish teams at the top.

Note to the next Eagles' defensive coordinator:

If you trip and fall around your players next summer, get up quickly. Otherwise you're likely to be on the bottom of a big pile.