As I was walking down the street one day…

Willie Mitchell’s eye turned a new shade of purple today. It’s not a pretty sight — click here if you really want to see what it looked like before Saturday’s game — but all things considered, Mitchell escaped relatively unscathed after being hit by a shot. Mitchell is even having some fun with the (literal) eyesore. Today, I asked Mitchell if he had been getting any strange looks around town in recent days…

MITCHELL: “I was out walking with my wife one day, and I was wearing a hoodie so that no one could see it. We were walking back to our house — we kind of live on a busy street — and we were walking our dog and I said, `OK, I’ll take my hoodie off. You walk behind me and see people’s reactions.’ She was laughing. It was priceless. Because people don’t really react until after they see me, and they didn’t know we were together. So they’re like, `Oh my God, did you see that?’ So it makes for a few laughs, that’s for sure. People in Canada, they would know you and they would understand. People here, it’s like, `Um, what the heck?’ Kind of funny.”