Mother Nature is alwaysin charge. And thanks to her, the NHL has moved the start of Monday's 2012 Winter Classic game back two hours. The New York Rangers will face off outdoors against the Philadelphia Flyers at 3 p.m. ET (rather than the planned 1 p.m. ET), from the Phillies' Citizens Bank Park.
The game airs on NBC, but pregame coverage begins at 1 p.m. ET on the network NBC Sports -- the renamed cable channel that used to be called Versus. NBC's Sunday announcement said the game was moved back "to facilitate optimal game conditions."
FYI, at Sunday 8 p.m. ET, it's raining in the Philadelphia area, with a temperature around 50 degrees F -- not exactly "optimal" hockey weather. Tomorrow's forecast is for temperatures around 40 F, getting chillier as the afternoon progresses.
Also moving back on Monday, Jan. 2 -- NBC Sports' postgame premiere of the documentary Cold War on Ice: Summit Series '72 (now 6 p.m. ET on NBC Sports cable, the channel that used to be called Versus). It's a political as well as sports document, flashing back to the landmark 1972 series of games between Canadian all-stars and the Soviet Union team. At a time Soviet players were kept behind "the iron curtain," unable to play elsewhere and held up as a beacon of their country's Communist regime, the Soviet team was a year-round global juggernaut.
If you don't know who wins the series, seek no spoilers! This is one of those stranger-than-fiction melodramas that's well worth watching.
Especially 40 years later, when its heated geo-political permutations may seem like ancient history.