After this part, there’s only one more part to this saga!
Reason 6: Live game atmosphere
So far, I’ve only been lucky enough to go to one NHL game. It was Bruins and Canadiens in the year before the lockout at the Bell Centre.
It ended up being a 1-0 game, and if I was watching it on TV, I probably would have called it a snoozer. But considering it was the Habs, playing the Bruins, in January, when both teams were around the same place in the standings (sixth and seventh-ish, I think), the crowd was nuts. I especially remember sitting next to a young woman a few years older than I was at the time. I was about 16, so she was probably in her twenties. She would sing along to the clips they played of pop songs in English, talk to her friend in rapid Québec French, and swear at the team in both languages equally. There’s nothing like someone yelling stuff like “tabernakshit!” to get you interested in what was going on.
When she gasped, I would too. When she would sit at the edge of her seat, grabbing onto the bar in front of her, so did I. There were back and forth chants supporting both teams, then saying both teams suck, then one lone guy behind me chanting “Here we go Red Sox, here we go!” as a joke to his buddies. I saw a man in front of me get a talking to from security while another man told the security guard to sit down because “I’m trying to watch the game here!” All in all, it was AWESOME. I haven’t been to any professional-level games in other sports, but I have been to school/university level games. Football was sometimes fun but that was usually because I was already drunk and it was something cheap to do. Rugby came close to hockey, especially with the ability to yell terrible chants (“The ref beats his wife” being a favourite.) In other words, a BLAST.
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