Well that was a fun almost-week. After being launched last Friday, the fan voting for the Hobey Baker Award, college hockey's top honor, has been closed. Here's the message on the official website:

Vote For Hobey reset
01/11/2007 5:35 PM

For technical reasons, Vote For Hobey will be reset with added security features. We apologize for any inconvenience. Voting will resume shortly.

Well played, Hobey Baker committee. Although you could take the word "added" out of that statement since there were no actual security features to begin with. As soon as I went to the site and saw the message "Fans may vote for one candidate at a time, but can vote multiple times per day," I knew this would not end well.

It seemed to become clear that people were abusing the system when Alaska's Kyle Greentree jumped from roughly 6000 votes to over 600,000 votes over the course of one night. I know it's easy to stay locked in a computer lab all day voting when the sun never comes out, but half a million votes in a few hours still seems a tad suspicious. Also, Rory Fitzpatrick was one of the top vote-getters, which is weird because he wasn't even on the ballot.

So a big thanks to all the dedicated fans out there that spent their time voting for their favorite player, but uh, none of that matters since they're resetting the voting. Super sorry.