Thursday, December 2, 2010

Too Long To Tweet: Our one and only "home" game

I live in an affluent county, and yet it only has one ice rink with one ice surface. This means that the overwhelming majority of county conference high school games are played at a large facility in another county, where the only fans are parents and such. But today was special. Sure, we lost 6-2, but we got to play our one game this season that's at the rink across the street from my school. The stands were packed with fans of both teams, but mostly ours. Of course, this being a high school athletic event involving mostly boys, the shit soon hit the fan.

First off, we didn't have our starting goalie. In our season opener, he managed to rack up 25 PIMs and a 3-game suspension, all on one play with under 2 minutes left. For this game (and presumably the next two) our coach decided to put the biggest skater in goalie pads and hope for the best. The first thing I noticed was that the game had a much faster pace than our first game. Nonetheless, the team played well (even the fill-in goalie) and the game was tied 2-2 after 2.
The third period was when things got out of hand. A go-ahead shorthanded breakaway early in the period and three more goals against after that were our undoing. But there's not really anything unusual about a school team with me on it losing (0-22 now, WHOO!!) The story was all the penalties, and the fan reaction. The game got really chippy, and as the period wound down, there seemed to always be 2 or 3 of our players (including one who'd gotten a 10min misconduct) in the sin bin. But here's the kicker- our coach got ejected with 3:33 left, so our suspended goalie came down from the stands to coach with the crowd chanting his name. It was awesome.
The two things I took away from the game were 1) that hockey kicks ass, and 2) that there's nothing more amazing than playing in front of a passionate home crowd.