My First NHL Experience

Last week I went up to St. Louis with my friend, Zach.  It was our first little trip together and our main purpose of the trip was to go to the St. Louis Blues/ Detroit Red Wings game.  I cannot say that I am knowledgeable in hockey in any way, shape or form.  I hadn’t seen a game on TV, I didn’t know any hockey players’ names, I haven’t even seen “Mighty Ducks”, and all I knew about how the game was played was that it was on ice, and you hit it into the goal!

My brother is a huge hockey fan, so he and my dad have gone to quite a few Blues games up in St. Louis, and my dad was telling Zach and me about the “Towel Guy”, how they chant “Ell-I-Ot” when Elliot keeps people from scoring and how to do the “Power-Play-Dance”,  and I just looked at him like he was crazy, not knowing what any of this meant.

Zach and I arrived in St. Louis a few hours before the game and we stayed with his grandparents, who were the greatest hosts ever.  They showed us the way to the train station, and Zach and I took that right to the front of the Scottrade Center, which was amazing because we didn’t have to pay for parking or fight traffic, and the train ticket was only $4.50 round trip!

 

We found our seats and decided to walk down by the ice and stand over by where the players come out.  I was trying to get Zach an autograph, but instead got to “fist-bump” about 7 members of the St. Louis Blues, which was a weird sort of excitement for me!  When they got out on the ice and were practicing I could not believe how good they are at skating.  I have watched figure skating in the Olympics, but I almost think this is just as impressive in a different way.

The game got started and we sat through two fairly uneventful periods, but the third one was all kinds of exciting.  We scored two points and we got to see the infamous “Towel Guy”- who jumps over a row of seats and flings a towel around and snaps it one time for each number of points we have.  It’s just a silly tradition, but I guess he’s at every single game; I’d love to know how that got started.  We chanted “Ell-I-Ot”, “Let’s go Blues”, and cheered the players on.  We even got to do the Power-Play-Dance, which made us both giggle the first time because all we could picture was my dad dancing.

Unfortunately for us, the Red Wings came back and scored two points as well.  The game went into over-time, in which no one scored, and then I got to see a shoot out!  It was really intense and I caught myself holding my breath when we shot, hoping the goalie would miss the puck and we’d win, but unfortunately the Red Wings beat us in the shoot out.

Even though our team lost there were a lot of conversations and laughs between the Red Wings and Blues fans, and it was actually a lot of fun.  I always love live sporting events with all the energy flowing through the crowd, and it even carried on to the train where Blues fans still showed their support for their team, and looked forward to the play-offs!  It was a really great first NHL experience.