Now that we’ve established that the National Hockey League Winter Classic will be (at least, it should be) a yearly event, is it possible to expand the concept to other sports?It’s amazing, by the way, that the concept of an outdoor NHL hockey game wasn’t developed sooner than it was. Hockey is, after all, an outdoor game, played on frozen ponds and flooded-out rinks wherever it is meteorologically feasible. Why this hasn’t become a cottage industry before now means that somebody – probably a lot of bodies – dropped the ball.Whichever marketing genius within the NHL who finally thought of it, though, should have a job for life, especially since it’s probably one of the few days out of the long winter season when the NHL takes the lead over the NBA.But I wonder ? how practical would it be to franchise this idea and expand it to other sports? Could you, for example, find a vacant lot somewhere, find some burlap bags for bases, and stage a “Sandlot Classic?” It would be a heck of a lot of fun if you could, but where would you put the 50,000 or so people who’d want to watch it?What about a National Basketball League “Playground Classic?” It might be possible for this to work out a little better, as you’d need a big playground somewhere with one of those hot-top courts in the middle of it. Easy enough to create, I suppose, but, again, where would you put the people? They’d have to scour surrounding areas for enough bleachers to accommodate the fans.But the big problem here is that basketball is pretty much an inner-city game. Most of today’s NBA stars honed their skills not on suburban playgrounds, but in urban parks where there just isn’t a lot of room to do what the NHL has done.And where would you put a “Football Classic?” After all, if the idea of the “Winter Classic” was to bring professional hockey players back to their roots by staging the game outdoors in the freezing cold – thus simulating pond hockey – the only logical place for a similar-type football game would be in some dilapidated high school field with rickety bleachers and a press box suitable for about three inhabitants (although these days, it would be filled with coaches and hangers-on, thereby forcing any media lucky enough to get in to either stand between two cable TV cameramen or skip the honor altogether and cover the game from the stands).Since there would be more media than there are seats in those stands clamoring to cover such a game, just that alone would negate the thrill of NFL players returning to their roots.This is why, of course, the NHL “Winter Classic” is unique. The league has taken advantage – thus far – of some of the nation’s most beloved parks (Fenway Friday and last year Wrigley Field) to appeal to the sport’s fans’ sense of history while also appealing to all our yearnings to be in on something new and innovative. In other words, the league hit one out of the park on the first try.If you go back to the 1970s as a hockey fan, you couldn’t help get a little misty over seeing Bobby Clarke and Bobby Orr taking part in the ceremonial faceoff before the game. Clarke is one of the biggest reasons the Bruins have won only two Stanley Cups in our lifetime instead of three. He was on the other end of perhaps Orr’s biggest career disappointment – the failure to defeat the Flyers in the 1974 Stanley Cup finals.One supposes that next year, New York will be the venue of the Winter Classic, as, perhaps, it should be. The Rangers are one of the NHL’s original six, and I’m surprised, frankly, that the Big Apple hasn’t been approached before now.The only fly in the ointment, though, is that the game will probably be played in the new Yankee Stadium instead of the historic OLD Yankee Stadium, which will take some of the luster off it – at least to me. One of the biggest selling points of this classic, so far, has been the use of historic venues to reinforce the continuity of hockey in some of these cold US and Canadian cities.But whatever they decide to do