Hockey, Eh?

I'm not a hockey fan. We didn't have ice skating in Louisiana when I was a boy. Somebody eventually did get around to opening a rink there when I was in my teens, but it was the only one in town, and the ponds and swamps seldom froze solid enough to skate upon. Maybe twice I can remember, and then only for a few days, so it wasn't an activity anybody was going to do. I found I was able to transfer some of my roller skating skills to ice, but it was harder, and colder when you fell. 


Ice skating in Louisiana. Kind of like the Jamaican bobsled team. You know somebody was stoned when they thought that one up.


Um. Anyway, we do have a junior hockey league team in Portland, the Winterhawks, and they are good enough to have clinched the WHL championships in their division this year. 


There was another game after they got that, against Spokane, and my son got tickets for the company's private suite, so he took his two older boys and me last night.


The suite experience is not the same as the nosebleed seats. You get big screen TVs, there's a bar, a waitress comes around and takes food orders, all like that. You don't get to concentrate on the game as much, but since the only part I could follow was when one of the teams made a goal, that didn't matter much. You can get up and walk around, and they had the March Madness games on the TV, so people were watching that in the b.g.


The Hawks lost to the Chiefs, 6-3, but since it didn't really matter, save for pride, nobody was too disappointed.


It was an interesting experience, but there weren't any teeth knocked out, and it was a pretty clean game. Some shoving, a couple times a couple players wrestled a bit. Hard to fight on ice skates. Lot of guys went to the penalty box, which is how the Chiefs got six points.


The most fun was at half-time when they brought out two teams of nine-year-olds to play a three-minute game. That and the kiss-cam ...