Dr. Girlfriend’s dad took me to a hockey game this past weekend.  He’s a Detroit Red Wings fan, and the Wings were playing the Carolina Hurricanes in Raleigh, so he invited me to come along.  It was my first hockey game, and I loved it.

I have long wanted to attend a professional hockey game.  When I was a kid, Augusta, Georgia had a minor league team, the Augusta Lynx (the team has since moved to Macon, Georgia, and operates under a different name; the James Brown Arena’s ice machine broke down and the repairs were too costly, so the team shuttered before reviving briefly and then moving to Macon).  The local oldies station that I would listen to while doing my homework would cut in with live broadcasts of the games.  I rarely listened to them—it was hard to focus on homework with frantic play-by-play calling—but I always though it was cool that we had a local hockey team.

Sadly, I never made it to a Lynx game, and my desire to witness the sport live went unfulfilled until this past weekend.  Dr. G’s dad got us tickets, and we were literally five rows back from the ice.  It was so close that we could feel when one of the massive players slammed into the plexiglass barrier between us and the rink.  When a player would be put into the penalty box, we could feel the cold of the ice coming through the little door, even though we were still behind a layer of plexiglass.

The action was quick.  The game struck me as something of a blend of football and rugby, but on ice.  It had something of soccer’s difficulty in scoring, but with far more intense action.  A soccer field is huge—so huge that it seems like the action is too slow and spread out.  In hockey, everything is really compact, and there is a great deal of physical contact.

Needless to say, it’s really fun to watch, but you have to watch closely.  I turned to Dr. G’s dad at one point and missed the Red Wings scoring.  It really is a “blink-and-you’ll-miss-it” sport.  Like soccer, though, there can be minutes on end where nothing “really” happens—there’s a lot of action, but no scoring.  You can’t let yourself get lulled into a false sense of security.

The atmosphere at Raleigh’s Lenovo Center was electric; they really know how to put on a show.  At the beginning of each of hockey’s three periods, a camera would show the team walking from their locker rooms out to the ice.  It was pretty hilarious watching the goalie tromp on his skates, looking like Jason from Friday the 13th in battle armor.  Our seats were in a special “premiere” section, too, so we had our “own” concession stand (shared with probably a thousand other people); the hot dog was delectable.

Speaking of the goalies—those guys are wild!  They have to perform splits at times to block the puck.  The goal is also tiny—way smaller than I thought it would be.  That just increased the challenge of scoring, and it made scoring even more satisfying.

My takeaway is that hockey is what soccer could be if the field was way smaller and the players interacted more physically.  With that physicality, though, was a certain gracefulness.  It was amazing how these huge dudes—many of them well over six-feet tall—pirouetted across the ice like ballerinas.  Majestic!

So, if you haven’t done so, get yourself to a hockey game and grab a hot dog.  You’ll have a good time.