i feel like the better stat with Icculus is '25th time ever'

I don't really know what they "lost out" on.. Some shows they play a really long jam, usually they play one about as long as Sand and some stuff in the Stash/Slave range.

It's weird how many people are using terms like "aborted" and "ripcorded" for that Hood.. I just don't hear it at all. The setlist was planned, they lined up a segue into Silent perfectly, and they slid directly into it, probably my favorite segue since.. Sand-> Nellie Kane maybe? Tweezer-> Cities/Wedge was cool.. but way more often than not Phish segues end up like the Hood-> Light or Hood-> What's The Use? or Fluffhead-> Piper or Drowned-> Water In The Sky or Sand-> Roggae as a handful of examples off the top of my head.. Some are better than others, but most of the time it seems like someone gets taken aback by what would have been a smooth segue. stops, and has to start from the beginning for some reason.

When they pull off something like that -> Silent, all is forgiven. I get that everyone's in love with the Hood ending and all.. I just value the creativity and execution of that completely unique segue more than i'd value the 318th Hood ending.

Sure, last night could have had the "Dicks Roggae" a 30 minute excursion that folded time and space in on itself... but it's all good. Some shows, when they're flailing about, playing 5 encore songs in a row to end the 2nd set, presumably because they didn't keep track of time, that kind of criticism makes perfect sense. But when they're executing a specific vision, it's a different ballgame. Phish plays different kinds of shows.

Of course.. I thought they were just going to do "Spell Something" by Heavy Things... and that had my imagination going into overdrive thinking about things like

II: Light-> Lizards, Energy-> PYITE> Simple
and
II: Llama> Limb by Limb-> Energy-> Piper-> Slave