Passionate fans add spice to NHL’s record-setting day

January 2, 2008

ORCHARD PARK, N.Y. — The mood of a crowd is often found on a sign, and in the middle of 71,217 people on Tuesday afternoon, one placard offered a rich slice of the scene: LOOK MOM, NO ROOF.

In the middle of a football stadium, in a city famous for its snow, the Sabres and Penguins played a game of pond hockey that ended at 4:34 p.m. when Pittsburgh star Sidney Crosby, the league’s MVP, pushed a goal past Buffalo goaltender Ryan Miller, the game’s best netminder. “You could not have scripted it any better,” said Sabres center Adam Mair. “You have the best player in the world coming down on arguably one of the best goaltenders in the world.”

Somewhere tonight, an NBC and NHL executive are sharing champagne — at least until the television ratings come out. No, the hockey wasn’t great and the scoring was limited at Ralph C. Wilson Jr. Stadium — both teams skated hard but highlight-reel plays were limited with a slather of snow on the ice and blowing wind — but the players were merely secondary actors to Mother Nature and the crowd. It was the largest collection of people ever to watch a professional hockey game, and the parking lots outside the stadium started filling up shortly after the sun broke.

The tailgating scene was akin to an NFL game or the Coca-Cola 500. Outside the stadium, hockey games were held. Inside, flurries dropped on the shoulders of kids playing pickup ice hockey where O.J. Simpson and Thurman Thomas once ran. How strange was the scene? Bob Costas spoke in front of a Zamboni and reporters in the press box were as quick to surf onto weather.com as they were to their own sports sites. A Sabres p.r. official offered an all-time winner in the pre-game notes:

Both the Sabres and Penguins are 0-0-0 all-time on Tuesdays in Jan. when playing a game outdoors. Not anymore.

Crosby said he would remember the warmup and pregame pomp more than anything else. The teams first took the ice at 1:15 p.m. in a made-for-Las Vegas scene, featuring bursts of fire escorting them out of the tunnel. Singer Doug Allen offered a heartfelt version of the Canadian anthem and noted Irish tenor Ronan Tynan brought down the house with a crackling “God Bless America.” Pictures of Sabres fans serving in the military appeared on the Jumbotron. Moments later, four Blackhawk helicopters soared over the stadium. Game on.

With the game-time temperature 33.1 degrees Fahrenheit (the average temperature in an NHL arena is 62 degrees), it was practically Boca Raton-like in Buffalo; and it turned out to be a warm occasion thanks to the crowd, who deserved the first, second and third stars. They stood for much of the game, and the best seats in the house, based on one reporter’s research, were in Row 38 of Section 332, seats 28-30, where a group of friends from Niagara Falls paid $44.75 to sit at the highest point of the stadium. They were rewarded with a perfect view of the entire ice.

“This is too good,” said Aaron Sawyer, a 20-year-old from Niagara Falls who sat in seat 30. “The snow is big and chunky, and we can see everything.”

Sawyer got his ticket thanks to the quick hands of his childhood friend, Joe Warner, 20, and Warner’s fiancée, Carol Kania, 21. Warner was one of the thousands of western New Yorkers who went online the day tickets became available (tickets sold out in about 40 minutes).

If Sawyer and his crew had the best seats in the house, Jonathan Barauskas, 23, and Brian Malaney, 21, might have had the worst. The Niagara Falls duo sat in Section 133, Row 1, Seats 1 and 2, the first row of the stadium. Alas, the seats were obstructed and the pair had to watch the game from the Jumbotron. They said they could see the players numbers but not the puck. Still, they called it the best $10 they ever spent. (All obstructed seats were discounted.) Jeff and Jenn Bucki of Orchard Park enjoyed the best of all worlds. They sat outside but were covered from the snow in club-level seating in Section 237.

The $203 tickets were a gift from Jeff’s parents (courtesy of being Sabres’ season-ticket holders). Jenn, an Edmonton native, said she had tickets to the Heritage Classic between the Oilers and Canadians in 2003 but had to give them up because her then-boss insisted she work that day. She said the temperature was minus-17 in Edmonton on the day of that game. “My buddy’s eyelashes were freezing as he watched; that’s how cold it was,” she said. Though the crowd was well-behaved on the whole, a pair of national guardsman assisting with the security on the top level of the stadium told SI.com they had seen at least 15 people asked to be removed from their seats because of aggressive behavior.

NBC’s executives were praying for flurries to set a winter scene; and by the second period, the ice was bathed in a white covering, which blurred the center-ice logos and blue lines. The snow got particularly thick in the third period and wind swirled across the ice. The teams switched sides at in the 10:00 mark of the third period and at 2:30 of overtime session so weather would not be an advantage. Needing a goal in the overtime shootout to lift his team to an extra point, with the crowd shivering in delirium, Crosby beat Miller between his legs in Round 3 of the shootout.

“I’ve seen a lot of him the last few years, so you know I wanted to stop him,” said Miller. “I thought I made a good play to stay with him. I didn’t think he made quite the play he wanted to, but it worked out for him.”

Miller is a thoughtful athlete and a bit of a renaissance man — he’s an amateur photographer who shoots vistas for fun, and two days before the game dubbed “the Ice Bowl” by the locals, he joined Tynan and the Buffalo Philharmonic on stage where he strummed guitar on U2’s “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.” He started in goal for Michigan State in the 2001 Michigan-Michigan State Cold War Game in East Lansing — the largest crowd ever to watch a hockey game — and said he was so nervous that he was unable to take in the larger context of being part of a mega-event. This time he wanted to take in the experience and found himself watching the crowd at times. “It was a cool experience,” Miller said. “Everybody was so dialed into watching a hockey game.”

NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman said in a statement after the game that the NHL would be looking at doing the event again in the future. It’s a no-brainer, with a rotation that should include Buffalo as one of the core cities. More than four hours after the game’s conclusion, about 45 workers were slowly deconstructing the rink. The snow continued to fall inside the stadium, but the goals were still in place. Eventually, a dozen of the workers made their way onto the frozen sheet in front of the player benches. On the other side of the ice, a colleague snapped a photo for posterity. Each wanted a piece of the night, and, really, how could you blame them?

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