Welcome to the Tuesday edition of The Cooler, where I hope you wanted to hear a lot about music. Let's get to it:
*After two seasons, the Wild is ditching "Let's Go Crazy" as the song played after goals.
The team paid tribute to Prince by playing the song after goals during its final playoff game of the 2015-16 season, and season-ticket holders liked it enough that they voted to permanently change to "Let's Go Crazy" from Joe Satriani's "Crowd Chant," which had been the goal song for a decade.
Now it seems those same fans have had another change of heart. Fans surveyed this offseason favored another switch, according to a letter emailed to season ticket holders. The Wild will either go back to "Crowd Chant" or roll with "Glass House" by Kaleo.
There seemed to be a strange unease among the Xcel faithful with having "Let's Go Crazy" as the goal song, so I'm not terribly surprised by the switch.
Then again, the Wild scored the most goals in franchise history (266) when it went with Prince full-time two years ago, and it had the second-most in franchise history (253) last season.
I'd say the smart money is on a return to "Crowd Chant" because of familiarity — and because fans probably never had a chance to get tired of it because they rarely heard it.
*Speaking of music, it struck me the other day that a weird offshoot of Joe Mauer's likely retirement is that we won't be hearing his trademark walk-up music anymore.
Mauer has almost exclusively used T.I.'s "What You Know" since the 2006 season, the vast majority of his career.
Those who follow his walk-up music more closely than I do say he briefly mixed in Finger Eleven's "Paralyzer" around 2007, and he walked up a handful of times to "The Joe Mauer Theme Song" and its sequel, performed by local musician A&R, in both 2008 and 2009. And Twins writer Phil Miller tells me that sometimes in late game situations a walk-up song isn't played.
But I count close to 3,600 home plate appearances for Mauer since the start of the 2006 season, and it's safe to say that in well more than 3,000 of them, fans heard the first 10 seconds or so of "What You know."
It was surely a comfort to Mauer, who won three batting titles and an MVP award with that song and who — as Michael Cuddyer revealed in a 2009 Star Tribune story — at one point dabbled in rap and recorded his own tracks that he put on his iPod.
The vast majority of fans probably don't know that the rest of the explicit version of the song is, um, not even close to suitable for playing at Target Field.
But if you went to every Mauer home game, you've heard the equivalent of more than 8 full hours of the clean start of the song since 2006. And not hearing it any more would be strange.
*Case Keenum is going to have nightmares about this missed throw for a while. It would have given the Broncos a late go-ahead TD, but instead Denver lost a 27-23 thriller to Kansas City.
