Bad news, ladies. Mike Comrie, as you've doubtless heard, is off the market.

Bad news, gentlemen. So's Hilary Duff.

I don't normally go in for the gossip pages, but this was a special case. My feelings towards Mike Comrie have been somewhat conflicted over the years. Once I practiced signing my name "Benjamin Comrie" with little hearts over the 'i's. Then I hated him in only the way a spurned lover or hockey fan can, cursing his name and his family and the day he was born and every decibel I spent cheering him on as a Saint and as an Oiler. And now he's back and things are good but I still watch him warily, once spurned and twice shy.

There are all sorts of questions about this engagement. Questions such as "will a married, happy family man Comrie have the same vigour and fire that characterized his best seasons?" and "is he getting too Hollywood? Will his effort suffer?" and "uh, Hilary Duff does know Mike lives in Edmonton, right?"

Remember, Mike Comrie is the same man who said of Edmonton "it's like communism there". Is Ms. Duff ideologically correct? Does she believe in veteran forwards and relentless rebuilds and the Greenwich Village of western Canada? If we spent $16 million on an infirm goaltender, is this manifest stupidity or an indication of how serious the organization is about winning?

Will she try to trade him for Corey Perry and demand that he pays her on his way out the door?

Apparently, Mike spent a million dollars on Hilary's engagement ring. A million dollars! What the hell happened to the two paycheque rule? Comrie's cap hit for this season is a cool $1.25 million, and when you remember that Mike already dropped a cool hundred grand on a Mercedes for his beloved's birthday, the only possible conclusion is that Hilary Duff is literally impoverishing Mike Comrie. I hope that Mercedes is at least a hard top because Mike's going to need it when he's living in the back of that Merc down by the river!

(You know you're reading the Copper & Blue when a player gets engaged and I immediately tell you about his cap hit.)

Come to think of it, how the hell do you spend a million dollars on an engagement ring? Allow me to put on my Gabe Desjardins hat. The price of gold is about $1,156 Canadian per troy ounce, and a troy ounce is about thirty-one grams. So a million bucks buys you 26.8 kilograms of gold. Maybe only half of it went to the ring and the other half of it went to the robotic hand she'll need to lug that fucker around everywhere. Maybe Mike saw an ad for that dollars for gold website and got confused. Maybe Lindsay Lohan got a 25 kilogram engagement ring and Comrie felt the need to one-up that. Maybe the Brick is selling engagement rings now and their prices are just as competitive as ever.

It's got to be bad for morale in the dressing room, though. What about the Oilers who married the girl next door before he got rich and famous? Who proposed on bended knee in a public lavatory with an onion ring? Comrie's got to be making them look pretty bad, with his seven-figure bling and all. If you're Ryan Potulny and you're making eleven dollars an hour working down at the cannery the Oilers second line, how do you think Mrs. Potulny is going to look at you when she sets down her Edmonton Sun and gives you the particulars of Comrie's engagement? Do you think "well, he's heir to a massive furniture fortune and saved a lot of money by not giving his signing bonuses back to his general managers" is going to go over well?

And then you make a snide remark in practice and then Mike questions your manhood in the shower and then you end up fighting and it's not the kinky sort of fight either but the kind where eyes get torn out, which I guess might be kinky to a certain subsection of our audience but not to the kind that wants us to win hockey games, and then Marc Pouliot somehow breaks both his legs watching this unfold and Steve Tambellini winds up convinced that he needs more players who are old enough to already be married and expensive enough to afford the really dynamite jewelry.

So, really, this could all go very wrong for us very quickly.