Game on!

I have a hockey puck sitting on a shelf above my desk today, a souvenir from last Friday night. This particular puck bears the logo of the New York Islanders on it. Almost ninety-six hours ago I got to see the Islanders play for the first time since 1991. That last game had been an exhibition game and played the day after my birthday. I had been looking forward to last Friday night since early November when I bought tickets to the game. And the 26^th finally rolled around so my friend Greg and I could go take in a game and enjoy a Guys Night Out.

We departed town about three and a half hours before the game’s start time. I thought we had left too early but as it turned out, our departure time was well-warranted. It’s a given that most of the roadways coming out of Atlanta on a Friday afternoon are parking lots as people try to get home. I hadn’t anticipated the highways coming into downtown Atlanta to be parking lots as well, but they were. It’s hard to believe some of the road signs when you’re traveling at 70 miles per hour when they say “Next 9 miles: 25-27 minutes,” but the signs were correct. I think it took about 25 minutes to travel the last two miles to the off ramp we needed to take.

Ironically, I guess, once we got to CNN Center/Philip Arena complex, it was easy to get food pretty quickly but it seemed it took about 25 minutes of wandering around before we found a place to sit and eat. As we roamed around looking for a table I took note of the crowd. I had assumed that given how many displaced Northerners there are in Atlanta, that I’d see a number of Islanders jerseys & shirts around. The number of people wearing Islanders apparel I could count on one hand, the place being awash in light blue Thrashers jerseys and other wearables. Suddenly I felt very much out of place, especially for someone who’s lived in Georgia for a long time. True, I will root for the Thrashers when I watch their games on television and I want to see them do well (it looks like they may make the playoffs this year). But I don’t root for them when they play the Islanders and I was there to see the Islanders, not the Thrashers.

We had great seats for the game, the lower level only six rows back and about 10 feet from the glass. I told my friend Greg in advance that we had good seats, but I don’t think he had any clue as to how good they were. We got to our seats and I turned to him and said, “See, I told you we were close enough to catch teeth when someone’s checked into the boards.” And we were (though a number of players were checked into the boards in front of us, we did not catch any teeth that night). It had been a while since I had been to a hockey game, so I was reminded as to just how small the playing surface really is. Television makes the ice look so much bigger than what it actually is.

The game started off very badly for the Islanders. Starting goalie Rick DiPietro gave up three goals inside of the first six minutes of the game. As the crowd rose to their feet after the third goal, I thought, “Shit, this is going to be a long night.” The chubby Thrashers fan to my left looks over and says, “Heh, maybe you’ll be able to stand up at the first intermission.” I explained my dual fandom of the Islanders and Thrashers, which put him on notice that he wasn’t going to get under my skin. He didn’t say much after that. Maybe it was my running explanation and discussion of the game to my friend Greg that told chubby I understood the game much better than he did, and that it wasn’t the equivalent of a greased pig contest on skates.

It has to be said that while Atlanta seems to be supporting their hockey team right now, with many games sellouts or near sellouts, the city is not a hockeytown in the truest sense. Look at cities like Montreal or Detroit. They take their hockey with deadly seriousness much in the same way football, especially at the collegiate level, is taken in the south. I know in New York I learned to skate long before I learned to play baseball or football. You can’t do that in Atlanta (or in most of the south). You go into a store and all of the skates have wheels on them as opposed to blades. There are a few places where you can go ice skating, but for the most part the only use ice skates get in the south are as decorations hanging on the garage wall.

After the Thrashers netted their third goal in under six minutes in the first period, the Isles pulled DiPietro (which received boos from the Atlanta crowd, now sensing a blowout and wanting more blood) and put Mike Dunham in goal, who did a much better job for the remainder of the game. Despite giving up three goals early, the Isles began to fight back. They scored their first goal during a Thrashers power play. I just laughed. “They scored a shorthanded goal on the Thrashers. Excellent!” The guy next to me looked to see if I was going to stand and applaud the goal, but I had just gotten comfortable in my seat. The thought occurred to me that perhaps that may have been my only opportunity to applaud an Islanders goal that evening, given how awful they had started the game. But I got to stand and applaud two goals during the second period. I missed their fourth goal that came early in the third period as I decided during the second intermission that the time was right to go find a souvenir or two to bring home to my daughter.

Regulation play ended with both teams tied at four goals apiece, which meant only one thing: free hockey! I paid for three periods of hockey and now we got an extra helping. My friend Greg asked how the overtime periods worked and why the teams played at four-man strength instead of the usual five-man teams. The Isles played really hard during the overtime period, taking some really good shots, but with just over two minutes left in overtime the Thrashers scored the game winning goal. It was not the outcome I had hoped for, but the Islanders came back from three goals down (not an easy feat by any measure, especially against a good team like the Thrashers) and forced the game into overtime. The chubby Thrashers fan next to me and I both agreed that it had been a good game. And it was good to see the Islanders play again in person, win or lose.