Last Friday, Woodward was lined with partiers spilling into the streets and cops trying to keep them in line. No, it wasn’t another shootout at Bleu. Or the old State. Or (insert Woodward club name here). It was the Red Wings victory parade!

We’ve had huge parades in the city before: giant turkey floats on Thanksgiving, drunken leprechaun mascots on St. Patrick’s day, and the stream of unqualified Kilpatrick relatives headed to the City County building for employment.

But this one is special – unlike the aforementioned ones, this has to be earned by physically beating the hell out of other people. Though I guess that applies to the city jobs too if you consider mayoral pal Bobby “pistolwhip” Ferguson and his sweetheart city contracts. But I digress!

Four parades in 11 years – it’s easy to feel spoiled. But there’s a cure for that feeling, people: it’s called the Detroit Lions. In the end, it balances out. If you start feeling too proud, picture Matt Millen for some mental saltpeter.

Organizers, faced with the option of a lovely Saturday a mere few days hence, naturally chose a busy, inconvenient workday Friday to hold the parade. Regardless, thousands did their part to further weaken the economy by skipping work to come downtown. Once everyone arrived and staked out their spots, the police thoughtfully parked SUVs directly at the curb at points along the route, utterly ruining the view for people on the sidewalk who came to see a parade and not the vehicles that never show up when 911 is dialed.

The heat was, well, hot. Like 90-something degrees, made worse standing on the baking pavement. This caused everyone to strip down to their bare minimums. Sometimes this is good. More often than not, it’s very very bad. Some people simply should never get semi-naked in public, and even sometimes in private. Yet here they were, lined up like sausages bursting out of their casings or like thin, white asparagus spears grown in a dark cellar.

Finally, one by one, drunk Red Wings rolled down the street in pickup trucks. Johan Franzen and his Swedish model wife, Andreas Lilja and his Swedish model wife, Niklas Kronwall and his Swedish model wife. You get the idea. It was like a pageant of lovely Vikings.

Then the mayor got onstage at Hart Plaza and got everyone mad. Boos rang out loudly and persistently. Even the normally foolproof pretend offer of free beer failed to quell the hoots. The reaction from supporters was that these people are mostly suburbanites with no say in city elections, so who cares what they think. On the other hand, these suburbanites don’t have a say in the incalculable damage a drawn-out scandal has on the entire region but have to endure the effects anyway.

But yay the Wings won! Now we’ve got a whole summer without quality sports. Yes I considered the Tigers before writing that. Out east, NHL darling Sidney Crosby has a whole summer to come up with new ways to perfect his on-ice diving and his whininess, and the godawful NBC/Versus announcers have time to look up what hockey is and what the rules are. And Lilja can learn not to hand the puck gift-wrapped to opponents in his own zone at critical moments.

For now though, it’s a summer of drinking in the sun, city hillbilly style, like Chris Chelios here, on the back of a truck, savoring like the rest of us a happy day, a brief time when the city of Detroit is associated with something positive for a change.