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On February 2nd, 2017 I found myself happily hunkered down with my mom for my nearly-annual visit to her winter palace in New Port Richey, just north of north of Tampa. And while I enjoy nothing more than whiling away the days sitting in the shade chatting with my mother and eating her potato chips, I always try to find a ticketed reason to get out of the house, and this time it was an NHL game between my two favourite teams, my old hometown Ottawa Sens and the Tampa Bay Lightning.
(Or what used to be my two favourite teams anyways. When Martin St. Louis traded himself away from Tampa Bay I realized that I was a much bigger fan of the spunky little skater than I was of the rest of the Lightning, especially the management that treated St. Louis so poorly. And when I moved away from Ottawa the Senators were in shambles and I no longer felt much of an urge to cling on to such a depressingly sinking ship. I do have my eye on that new team in Las Vegas though. Of course if they became my team I’d have to make it down there for a home game every season or so.)
It just so happens that my brother Alan also has a nest in The ‘Richey (as nobody calls it) and we went to the hockey game together. Actually, there’s a fair chance that I bought him the ticket as a xmas present and if I did I got him a good one, as we were sitting in the fourth row of the 100 level, just a few rows off the glass. Come to think of it, there’s no way I could have convinced him to buy a $96 hockey ticket, so for sure I gave it to him as a gift.
Regardless, it’s the pregame festivities that stand out in my mind from this evening, which is ironic, as you don’t even need a ticket to enjoy the pre-party that revs up outside of the Amalie Arena before every Lightning home game. There were food stands and interactive games and a beer garden and margarita stands and a stage and, well, everything else that you can imagine is definitely not found outside of home games up north in Ottawa, the second-coldest capital city in the world*.
So with a margarita in hand I spied a one-on-one mini hockey game thing that was basically an empty sandbox with a little ‘net’ cut into each end. Nobody was playing it so Alan and I stepped up. Now, not only was Alan always (and remains) my big brother in both a literal and figurative sense, but he also played a whole lot of hockey while we were growing up whilst I played exactly none. But no matter, this was just mini-hockey, and obviously just for fun! I set down my drink and the guy manning the booth handed us full-size hockey sticks. We stood for the faceoff with the puck between us and clicked our sticks three times, street-hockey style.
Click…click…click
I tell you, I was caught completely off guard when that third “click” came. I had my eye on the prize, staring straight down at that little flat disk when out of nowhere my brother spun around and violently body-checked me to the ground. Having taken out his man he was left to casually push the puck into my net, laughing all the way.
And that, my friends, is the sort of thing that only experience teaches you. Experience told me to just keep my gloves on and finish my drink.
The Sens won 5-2.
*The coldest capital city in the world is Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia**.
**Oh my goodness. After the simplest of google searches I’ve discovered that the world is not as I thought it was. Despite rumours to the contrary (many undoubtedly started by your truly) Ottawa is not the world’s second-coldest capital city at all. That (now-) dubious distinction belongs to the capital of Kazakhstan, a hitherto unknown metropolis called Astana. Then comes Moscow, then Helsinki, Reykjavik, Estonia’s beautiful capital city Tallinn and then finally, coming in at a wholly unremarkable seventh place, sits Ottawa. Sheesh.
Todd Man Out 