dad carried me outside the Gardens and the cold hit my

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Tulsa will be a huge underdog coming in to face No. 4 Ohio State Saturday in front of 100,000 fans in storied Ohio Stadium, but the Golden Hurricane wont be lacking in confidence.A good old-fashioned blowout will do that for a team. Nearly every aspect of Tulsas game was clicking last week when it pummeled San Jose State in its opener 45-10, showing signs that there could be major improvement from last years 6-7 squad.Of course, Ohio State -- which beat Bowling Green 77-10 in week one -- will be a much tougher opponent, but Tulsa coach Philip Montgomery said his team played with maturity and emotion, and he expects players will carry that right into Columbus.Weve got to be free, Montgomery said. We cant go in there and be hesitant about what we want to do. I dont want to walk off the field and still have bullets left, so were going to shoot them and see what happens.OFFENSE GALOREBoth teams showed they are loaded with offensive weapons. Tulsa running back DAngelo Brewer rushed for 164 yards and three touchdowns last week on 22 carries. Quarterback Dane Evans, directing the spread offense, was 12 for 23 for 198 yards and a touchdown as Tulsa rolled up 512 total yards. The Golden Hurricane was 13th in the country in total offense last year.Very talented receivers, two NFL prospects at wide receiver, a returning veteran at quarterback, Ohio State coach Urban Meyer said. They just force you to play in space.Ohio State broke a school record for offensive yards by piling up 776 against Bowling Green. Quarterback J.T. Barrett passed for six touchdowns and ran for another.Montgomery, a former Baylor assistant, recruited Barrett out of high school in Texas and knows how dynamic he is.He got them in and out of plays, he got them in and out of situations, threw the ball very effectively, and hes a dual-threat guy, Montgomery said. I mean, hes a guy that can pull it down and hurt you with his feet just as well as he can do it with his arm.BUCKEYES EXPECT MORE FIGHTIt was designed to be another tuneup game, but several Ohio State players said this week they expect Tulsa to put up more a fight than their week one opponent.I feel like were going to get some more experienced people, cornerback Gareon Conley said. I know a lot of guys had left from Bowling Green, and watching some of the film from Tulsa I know (they have) an experienced quarterback, so weve got to get ready for that. And they have a faster tempo.Said center Pat Elflein: Theyve got better players. They run some more stuff (on defense), theyre going to blitz us more, so its just kind of like another step up from Bowling Green.BURROW SHOWS HIS STUFFMeyer said he was pleased to see backup quarterback Joe Burrow get some significant playing time last week. Burrow, a redshirt freshman who likely is the Buckeyes quarterback of the future, took over for Barrett in the third quarter for mop-up duty. He was 6 for 8 for 68 yards and threw his first career touchdown pass.He confirmed what we all thought and what hes shown: Hes a tough guy who has talent, and it means a lot to him, Meyer said.Asked if he was confident Burrow could do the job if Barrett got injured, Meyer wouldnt answer. Im not going there, he said.Injuries forced Meyer to use his second- and third-string QBs to win the national championship in 2014.SMALL SCHOOL IN THE BIG TIMETulsa has the smallest undergraduate enrollment of FBS schools with 3,473 students; Ohio State is ranked third with 55,508.With a capacity near 105,000, Ohio Stadium will host the largest crowd ever to see Tulsa play football. The Golden Hurricane played in front of 85,657 last year at Oklahoma.---Follow Mitch Stacy at http://twitter.com/mitchstacyFor some of his other recent stories: http://bigstory.ap.org/content/mitch-stacy Prince Amukamara Jersey .5 million, one-year contract on Friday. Hawkins, who turns 41 in December, will compete with Rex Brothers for the closers role at spring training. Thomas Ives Jersey . Speaking to the Chicago Tribune at baseballs Winter Meetings in Lake Buena Vista, Florida, Boras called the former home of the Expos a "tremendous environment" for baseball. http://www.cheapbearsjerseyschina.com/jim-mcmahon-jersey/ .Y. -- Syracuse has turned up the defence at the right time all season, and when High Point threatened to pull off a monumental upset the second-ranked Orange did what they do best with their quick hands and savvy play. Jordan Williams-Lambert Jersey . Louis Blues absence from top spot in the TSN. John Wirtel Jersey .05 million next season unless Graham and the Saints subsequently agree on a long-term deal. The designation was released Monday after the deadline passed for NFL teams to use franchise or transition tags on players becoming free agents. TORONTO -- The things that make hockey beautiful are the same things that limit its popular appeal. Its almost too exotic for its own good. It requires ice, and not a little bit: great big sheets of it, clean and flawless. The ice means that hockey also requires skating. Like mastering a language, learning to skate rewards early adoption. Most of us can run, so we can come to understand and even play a lot of sports that we didnt grow up playing. We have already met their first demand. Hockey has a higher barrier to entry. If you cant skate, you cant play.I cant skate. Im Canadian, but my family is an immigrant family, and I was too late to the pond. A Canadian who cant skate is like an American who cant light a firework. Youre surrounded by people taking delight in something that has escaped you, everybody laughing at a joke thats gone over your head. Theres a fountain in front of Torontos iconic City Hall. In the winter it becomes a rink, of course, and I cant tell you how many times Ive watched people circling that square with a grace and speed that fills me with envy.World Cup of Hockey schedule: Watch on ESPN, ESPN2, WatchESPNBut I still love hockey, and I can identify the moment I fell for it and why. When I was very young, maybe 5 or 6, my dad took me to my first hockey game. We watched the Toronto Maple Leafs at Maple Leaf Gardens. We didnt have a lot of money, and its the only game we ever attended together. I can remember walking to that fabled arena, holding my dads hand so I wouldnt get lost in the bustle of the building crowd. I can remember being almost blinded by the glare off the ice. I can remember watching the first period and maybe part of the second, trying to take in all of hockeys crazy action, to parse its peculiar brand of collision physics.And then I can remember leaning into my dad and falling fast asleep.In Canada, hockey occupies the same place in our collective consciousness that baseball does in America, only it has inspired more riots. The rink, the heart of so many of our small communities, is our version of the ballpark as cathedral. The back of our $5 bill used to have an engraving of kids playing shinny on it. The prime minister prior to our current dreamboat was a hockey historian. Arguably the most famous song by The Tragically Hip, our unofficial national band, is about a hockey player who was killed in a plane crash. Most Canadians can tell you that the last goal Bill Barilko ever scored won the Leafs the Cupp.ddddddddddddIf you havent watched a lot of hockey, that romance and poetry will probably be lost on you. Thats understandable. On the surface, its a brutal game, bloody and ferocious, with its welts and bruises and lost teeth. It moves at a frenetic pace, too, the tiny puck sometimes lost in the blur, the shifts only a minute long, the changes in momentum almost too quick to appreciate. Baseball is complicated but slow enough to digest. Hockey is simple but too fast to see.I think everything changed that night at the Gardens when I fell asleep. Thats when hockey started making sense to me, when I didnt try so hard to watch it and instead let it filter through my dreams. The sound of the game stuck in my brain like a song that makes you smile every time you hear it.The distinctive sound that hockey makes is one of its happier accidents, the twin benefit of constructing a game exclusively out of hard surfaces and playing it during the quietest time of year, when the birds are gone and no leaves are rustling in the trees. Ice instead of grass, boards instead of chalk, skates instead of shoes, sticks instead of hands, pucks instead of balls -- each of its base elements makes a noise when it comes in contact with any of its others, all of them frozen solid. The hiss of a blade carving into a wet rink or the bang of a puck shot wide are unmistakable, as distinctive as fingerprints.Hockey might be the only sport that you can follow nearly as well in the dark, which is handy when the winter sun sets well before dinner. Other sports have their telltale noises -- baseballs crack of the bat, basketballs infernal squeaking of sneakers -- but hockeys sounds combine to make a symphony that tells so much more of its story. In other sports, the best plays are often lauded for their relative quiet: the swish of the perfect basket, the soundless connection between a quarterbacks spiral and the soft hands of his receiver. Hockey might never be still, but it is also never silent.I didnt wake up that long-ago night in Toronto until my dad carried me outside the Gardens and the cold hit my face. I can remember looking up at him and feeling confused and lost, except that I was in his arms. That was good enough for me. I closed my eyes again, and faseball Jerseys[/url] ' ' '