ChampionshipHistory.com

My buddy Aaron is a huge Stars fan. His story goes something like this: “I was working late night shifts and when I came home from work there was always a hockey replay on ESPN. This happened to be the year the Stars won the Stanley cup in 1999 and I followed them through the entire playoffs and loved every minute of it.” He gets the question quite a bit, considering he lives in Southern California.

When the Sharks and Stars were scheduled to play each other in the second round this year, I knew that both Aaron and I needed to go to one of the games. It didn’t look like we could make it to games 1 or 2, so it looked like game 5 in San Jose would be the one to go to. After three games and the Stars with a 3-0 lead it suddenly looked like we may have missed our chance. Luckily the Sharks pulled out game 4 in Dallas and the series moved back to San Jose.

I picked up two tickets on Ticketmaster as soon as they went for sale to the public on Thursday morning the day before the game. Aaron’s wife wanted to go to the game and my wife, Lauren, was sort of indifferent about it. Unfortunately Ticketmaster only allowed 2 tickets per person so it was going to be impossible to get 4 seats together. I still bought the two on Ticketmaster and then searched Craigslist for 2 seats as close as possible to mine. I ended up finding 2 one section over from ours and went for it. $160 a piece, not too bad. We were just offset from the net, facing a corner of the ice in the lower reserve seats. Great seats!

I think Aaron was one of about 5 Dallas Stars fans at the game. Not a lot of jeers from the crowd, which was a little surprising. More people looked at his retro Stars jersey and asked him if he liked the Chicago Bulls. Hmmmm. Anyway, the Sharks started off pretty slow and fell behind 2-0 after two periods. But with their playoff life on the line, they came out in the third a lot more aggressive and tied it up, sending the game to overtime. 65 seconds into overtime the Sharks score and the series continues!

We checked out the club area after the game and I picked up a hockey puck commemorating the Conference Semifinals. We walked downtown after the game to get something to eat and the line of people walking received a continuous amount of honking from cars. Seemed like the town was pretty pumped about the win.

This was Lauren’s first hockey game. And her words after the game were: “Hockey is my new favorite!” She loved it. She did complain a few times about the sillyness of the shark chomp and wasn’t a fan in general of the sharks logo. She actually joined Aaron and his wife in cheering for the Stars. But, what do you do? At least she likes hockey.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.