I really wanted to love this show. It has sexy, charismatic leads. It has fist-pumping sports action. It has power ballads! Oh, it has gender politics from the last century . . . heck, maybe the last millennium . . . I was fine with the rehashing of sports drama clichés – hey, look, it’s the underdogs taking on the underhanded champions! – and the occasional random plot twists (fear the escalator), but the show’s inability to shake its nostalgia for a time when men were men and went out into the world doing manly things while women stayed home faithfully tending the hearth was, well, frustrating. Sure, these modern warriors are tough on the outside but vulnerable on the inside, and may need to stumble by for a shoulder to cry on every few years, but the whole Odysseus/Penelope trope felt so eight century BCE. And even Penelope never considered marrying one of her thuggish, abusive suitors. The writer keeps stating that blind allegiance to absent men isn’t really the ideal, but in the end, that’s pretty much what the women choose. They wait, they nurture, and they take back the guys who for some baffling reason don’t seem to know how to operate a phone or send an e-mail. If you can turn off the critical part of your brain, the show has a fun summer popcorn flick vibe, but I was hoping for more than Top Gun on skates. I was also hoping that the women might eventually get fed up and whomp their errant men upside the head with a hockey stick. Just once. Maybe . . .