Southeast Michigan is in a hockey daze, and we’re hoping that when Friday’s final game in the Stanley Cup series is over, we’ll be able to savor a sweet hockey hangover.

I know, I know. For most of you, watching a game played on ice in the middle of June seems weirdly out-of-sync, but in Detroit, it’s what we’re living for these days, convention be damned.

Friday’s game is the final in the rematch of the defending Red Wings and the Pittsburg Penguins. It’s the finish line of a grueling, hard-fought, seven-game series to win Lord Stanley’s Cup, hockey’s holy grail, the stuff of which sports dreams are made.

That the deciding game is taking place in Detroit has Red Wings fans dancing in delight. Last year, the Wings skated to victory in Game 6 in Pittsburgh, where the win was a little less sweet without the hometown crowd to share it. There are, after all, no fans like Detroit Red Wing fans. They’re insanely raucous and loyal, their crazy-ass devotion lifting their beloved Wings higher and higher to this, the last game of a long, brutal, bloody battle of a season.

Today, Red Wings fans are kicking into high gear for Friday night’s game. They’re returning the empties cluttering up their back seats, basements and truck cabs; they’re selling their blood and spare gold to buy beer. They’re laundering their hockey jerseys, buying red face paint, crossing their fingers, and saying their prayers as they buff their medals of St. Christopher. (I’ll bet you didn’t know that St. Christopher is the patron saint of hockey, in addition to his better-known job of watching over travelers.)

Yeah, we know we’re going overboard. And we know we’re making way, way too much of a game, for goodness sake. But imagine that you’re living in ground zero of the great American economic meltdown. Imagine that the unemployment rate where you live is the highest in the country, three times that of the national average. Three times!

Imagine that you’ve lost your job and spend your days staring at the computer, struggling to write something people will want to read. Think how awful it is to spend an entire morning trying to be brilliant and all you’ve done is re-work the chorus of Carrie Underwood’s “Jesus take the wheel” to make it about the Red Wings. I simply couldn’t help myself after I saw this figurine of Jesus playing hockey:

I — I mean, we — need this game if for nothing more than to distract us from thinking about how much things around here suck.

Conversations these days always start with, “Guess who just lost their job?” Or, “Gosh, you look so relaxed now that you aren’t working anymore.”

We live waiting for the other shoe to drop. This Friday, we want first to see the puck drop; then, we want the Red Wings to clobber the Penguins good.

We know a lot of bad, really depressing stuff has been happening lately. Shootings, missing kids, bombings in the Middle East, North Korea, Iran, political wing-nuts on the loose, you name it — it makes us feel sick and hopeless. And we know hockey ranks low on the list of important things to think about. We appreciate that if you’re not a Red Wings or Penguins fan, you really don’t much care. And, personally, I appreciate how you all have indulged me these past couple weeks as I find new and exciting ways to write about the Wings.

But for me, for us, it’s the one ray of hope to which we’ve been able to cling. Late Friday night, we’ll know who wins and who loses, and until then, we’re reveling in the anticipation of it all.

* With apologies to Carrie Underwood.

 As are area businesses: