You are probably all excited about NHL 06. That's understandable. You have done without hockey for a long time, and you are tired of seeing the Blue Jays atop the nightly highlight shows. You want your game back. You want to hear the scrape of steel on ice. You want Jim Hughson and Craig Simpson. You want Ron n' Don.

Poor you. You will not be getting any Ron or any Don anytime soon. But the rest of hockey is back and, tickets notwithstanding, slightly more reasonably-priced. It is time to let your hopes run wild, time to talk about how great the parade is going to be, time to allow yourself a moment of moronic delight at seeing Eric Lindros in a Leaf sweater. It will still be a few weeks before the inevitable headline: "Lindros falls down, hurts self." Enjoy this time, is all.

On balance, NHL 06 will help you with that. Year after year, the NHL series provides reliable fun, and the current edition is better than the typical update. Partly this is because the post-salary-cap rosters are largely current (although when you first plug in the disc, E. Lindros is stuck in free-agent limbo; you will be forgiven if you leave him there). But mostly it is the relief.

NHL 2005 felt very much like the pre-lockout game: defence, defence, defence, and sorry if you thought hockey was a high-scoring game but we do things differently here in the pros. In NHL 2005 you could get the puck all to yourself, and do a little fancy skating and start lining up a wrist shot, and then an enormous defenceman would come along and flatten you. There was none of that fancypants skating backward and diving to block your shot, just plain old mean knocking you to the ice, with your teeth following shortly thereafter.

It wasn't the neutral zone trap, exactly (indeed, it was far crunchier and smelled more strongly of testosterone), but it did make for a low-scoring game. In NHL 2005, it was tough to make the end-to-end runs happen, and everyone who wasn't Don Cherry found that disappointing. This year, quick skating is back. It's easier, and more fun, to deke around the defenders. The whole thing feels lively and refreshed, like something you might enjoy for a half-hour before stepping out on the town.

Does that ring a bell? Sure it does. In the 1996 movie Swingers (which made Vince Vaughn so famous that his job this year consists of nothing but snuggling with Jennifer Aniston), a friendly and likeable crew of young men drink many cocktails, hang out in a lot of coffee shops, and play endless rounds of some 1990s edition from the NHL series. Their version of the game was plinky and not much to look at, but there was a lot of scoring and it got them swearing at each other. It was everything you could ever want in a hockey game, really.

The challenge now, a decade later, when 3D graphics can drop Mats Sundin right in the Uncanny Valley but the game on the real ice remains more or less the same, is to keep that same sense of lightness and fun, to keep video-game hockey something you do for a lark, for a few minutes, when a few pals are over. This one mostly gets it right, although not so right that you'd pick it over the 2D version from Swingers.

Still, there are impressive new features. You can create your own hockey player, and you can fiddle with his features and his dimensions until he is seven feet tall and has a nose like a pig. You can give him a giant moustache. You cannot, however, give him a moustache as enormous as Lanny McDonald's. That's something to look forward to for next year.