In retailiation of all the Cirque du Soleil shows and theatre and opera that I am dragging Mr K to, I am obligated to attend two hockey games and one basketball game (so far)… though in truth it might be retailiation for my dragging him to Monster Trucks for shits and giggles. Who knows?!
First thing I noticed about when we turned up to see the Washington Capitals play the Vancouver Canucks at the Verizon centre, is that the floor was not as sticky as the Pennsacola Bay Centre where we saw the Monster Truck rally, and I quite distinctly recall thinking that this alone is a good sign of the civilized entertainments that were surely to come. 😛
As Mr K was leading us to our seats, I was suprised as we entered and kept going down, down, closer and closer to the ice. We had great seats in Row E, and he had chosen the end where ‘our team’, the Vancouver Canucks, would be ‘shooting to’, twice (I don’t know, something to do with three periods thing). I know we had great seats, mostly thanks to the very loud and very obnoxious commentry from the guy behind us who spent a goodly portion of the first period talking about how great his tickets were, and the remaining two periods casting aspersions in the general direction of the Canucks, and what I am assuming passes for encouragement at the Capitals. Anyway, given we were sitting in front of this fine specimen of a hocky fan, I guess ours seats were even better than his. We were able to see right into the Washington Capitals bench (I mistakenly called it a dugout for some reason, and yes, I received an appropriate stare of disbelief and derision from Mr K for that one), and got a great view of the players facial expressions everytime someone got smucked into the glass barriers right in front of us. Very edifying, indeed.
So the game starts, and my primary observation is that everything moves so quickly that it is difficult to keep up with where the puck is. It’s quite hard to track even though it’s right in front of you and once a few players are scrimmaging over the damn thing, there are sticks and skates in there and you can lose track of it really quickly, and next thing you know – the puck flies all the way down the other end of the ice, and you can’t see it at all and you end up looking skywards to see where it ended up on the monitors or hoping for a replay to see what actually happened.
Something else I noticed was how quiet it is – we were behind the glass and you couldn’t hear what or if the players were yellin at each other. I mean at a football game or basketball game you can usually hear the coach and players yelling at each other as they attempt to run plays and navigate the field, but I couldn’t tell if the players were communicating out there at all. You assume they are, but the action seems to move with weirdly little noise. That is until the commentators feel the place is too quiet and they start revving up the crowd by literally telling them to ‘Make some noise’. I assume this is for the benefit of the home team so they know the crowd is behind them. A noise meter appears on the big screen and we discover the ambient noise is already around 76db and when they finally get them chanting and screamin it hits between 95-103db.
Naturally the crowd was only cheering for the local team, the Washington Capitals, and from what I can tell, they only have one player – some guy who wears the team number 8, and goes by the name of Ovechekin… because about 80-90% of the crowd wearing Capitals colours ALL had this guys jersey on. It was a rare person wearing any other number. But no pressure, mate.
I also noticed that the home team appeared to have a cheerleading squad, though they didn’t get out in front of the crowd, and they didn’t exactly do any ummm… cheerleading. They mostly seemed to be on the big screen talking to important old dudes during pauses in the game and occasionally wandering around with a bald eagle mascot throwing Chick-Fil-A burgers to the crowd! Very different from what I assumed most cheerleaders did. But whatever floats their boat.
And other than that, I can tell you the Zamboni guys were not very methodical in the manner in which they dressed/cleaned/whatevered the ice – they were a bit all over the place. And did I mention this game is stupidly fast? Cos that’s all I got! I got no idea how it works, no idea what the penalties were for, and only a vague idea of what a Power Play is (something to do with guys being sent to the Sin Bin). It was fun though. The Caps scored first, but the Canucks had leveled by the end of the first period, then at some point the Caps pulled ahead and then it was 3 all for a bit which had everyone very excited as there was not much time remaining. Then you should have seen the crowd go mad when the Capitals scored to make the score 4-3… I thought they might settle down for a bit then, but it seems everyone was then worried the Canucks would score once more and send the game into overtime, and they very nearly did. The Canucks had more attempts at goal and appeared to have more possession of the game (I’m not sure that is something they pay attention to) but just seemed unable to get past the Capitals defence. For the record, I think the goalies are fucking crazy, throwing themselves in front of them things when they are flying so fast.
And yea verily my ice hockey game cherry was popp’d! 😀
We have another game to go to next week – New Jersey Devils vs the Toronto Maple Leafs, and I am really hoping the Maple Leafs win, mostly for the extreme schadenfreude that I anticipate would result should such an occurrence come to pass!