'Tis the Season"

“Deck the halls with boughs of hockey,

Fa la la la la, la la la la.

Tis the season to be jolly,

Fa la la la la, la la la la.

Don we now our gay [hockey] apparel,

Fa la la, la la la, la la la.

Troll [for] the ancient Yule tide carol,

Fa la la la la, la la la f-ing - la.”

Yeah, and as I say every year – the ONLY good thing about winter is HOCKEY!! Afunt and I went to see our city’s beloved hockey team last night. And, almost got thrown in JAIL! (Nothing new for me but, hey, for Afunt - it mighta beena big deal, ya know? ;-)

We had decided to purchase tickets on the street once we got there since we have always gotten really good seats for cheap this way. Upon parking and walking up to the CNN center we wondered why we hadn’t seen anyone yelling out “Tickets!” the whole way up to the building like we ususally do.

I saw a guy holding [what looked like] really good box tickets (I can spot them a mile away) and asked him if he was selling them. He replied “Yes” and we offered him $40 each for them. (I was right- $86 face value – they were level 1 tickets – 7th row from the glass!) As we were getting ready to hand him the money a cop came up and said “Buddy! You cannot sell those here! You must go at least 1,000 feet from the venue before you are allowed to sell them.” No wonder we didn’t see many people selling tickets. He said, “Ok", and we all walked a little further and tried to do our transaction again and the cop came [again] and threatened arrest. Yikes! I mean, really, you would have thought we were trying to buy crack or something instead of hockey tickets! SHEESH!

So, we finally got FAR ENOUGH away from the cop to make our transaction – yeah, we didn’t have a tape measure, we weren’t pacing off the 1,000 lineal feet or anything so in essence we could have been arrested.

“Hey, I’m in the clink for buying a kilo of coke! How ‘bout you?”

“Umm,yeah, I just wanted to get into the hockey game?”

Anyway, once inside we got these nice, fuzzy Thrasher’s scarves to wear around our necks and they turned out to be quite nice later when we walked into the arena and the temperature drops about 20 degrees. (Afunt was actually trying to wrap her scarf all the way around her body to keep warm!)

All in all it was great seats, great fun but we lost in double overtime and a shootout. UGH! I hope this isn’t a bad omen for the season. And, to make things worse, we were beaten by our division rival who beat us out of the playoffs spot last year. But, regardless - they have a die-hard fan here! I will still go to the games whether they are good or not (and even if it does risk arrest to get good seats!) But, it’s always nice to hope for a good year!

GO TEAM!