Living in a non-hockey town is rough. Living in a non-hockey town when your favorite team is one game away from clinching its’ first ever Stanley Cup is killer.On Monday nights, I go to this bar/restaurant called Capital Ale House. It’s a nice place, good food and has a game room. While my friends played darts, I was glued to the TV in the game room after I discovered that it was turned onto the game. I was floored. I watched the game as long as I possibly could before I had to leave. I was annoying my friends the entire night with my stories of “old-school” hockey, and annoyed them even more when I was verbally breaking down Game 3.
My membership into the Fans of the NHL started back when I was seven years old. I lived in Bristol, Connecticut at the time, and that was a hockey town. Granted, there wasn’t a NHL team based out of Bristol, but Hartford was close enough. The Hartford Whalers were our team. Connecticut really only cared about two teams at the time: UConn and the Whalers. The Yankees, Giants, Red Sox, Patriots, Knicks, Islanders, Rangers and any other pro-sports team that was in the Tri-State Area took a back seat when it came to the Whalers or Huskies. So there I was, at seven years old, sitting in the Hartford Civic Center with my family, waiting on the start to my first ever hockey game. The Whalers were playing the Rangers, and I think that the Rangers won, but by the end of the night I was hooked. I realized that I loved hockey. The fast paced action, the goals, the buzzer going off on each goal, and the fact that it was played on ice made it even better. It was either all of those things, or I liked hockey because every time a goal was scored and the buzzer went off, my brother cried. It’s a toss up.
I went to more games than I can remember during the 1995 season. I saw the Whalers play the Penguins multiple times and got the opportunity to see Mario Lemieux and Jaromir Jagr skate together, in arguably the prime of their careers. I’m pretty sure that I saw most of the teams in the NHL that year. I didn’t care who I went to the game with. I went with my parents, just my Dad, my grandparents, my uncles and aunts. As long as there was hockey being played in downtown Hartford, I wanted to be there. And then in 1996-1997, the news of the purchase and eventually move of the Whalers came to light. At the last few games I went to at the Civic Center, they were giving out t-shirts. They had a huge version of the Whalers logo on the front, and on the back said “Save the Whale(r)s”. I got my own version of the t-shirt when I saw my final game. It was against the Islanders, and the Whalers won 4-3. It was sad leaving the arena for the final time, knowing that the team would be leaving the state of Connecticut. Little did I know that I would be following them in a short time period.
So the Whalers moved and became the Hurricanes in 1997. I moved from Connecticut to Virginia in 1997. So I liked to think that I followed my favorite hockey franchise when they moved, but the two occurances were entirely random and just coincidence. When I moved down to Virginia, I obviously made friends, and they all liked football, some liked baseball, but none of them liked hockey. Richmond had an AHL team, the Renegades, and so I had a way to get my hockey fix, but I still craved the NHL action.
So with my family moving into a new house, we got satellite TV. It was nice, being able to watch the games of the teams that my family likes (Giants, Yankees, Steelers, Red Sox and Patriots). I immediately saw my chance to get my NHL hockey fix: NHL Center Ice. My parents got it for me and quickly learned that I loved hockey just about as much as I loved football and baseball.
So now almost a decade has gone by since the Whalers became the ‘Canes. And already the team has been to two Stanley Cup Finals. They lost the first, but I believe that they have a real good shot at putting the Cup away against Edmonton in Game 6. I’d say it was a good move, and I think that this shows that hockey can be bred anywhere, including NASCAR dominated North Carolina. Even though Connecticut misses the Whalers, I’m sure that all ex-Whaler fans are happy to see the Whalers/Canes doing so well.
Especially this Whalers fan