Hockey Strong by Todd Smith

Author:Todd Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gallery Books

CHAPTER FIVE

DAVID CLARKSON

It’s a cold morning, January 1, 2015, and the sun has revealed the wreckage of last night’s New Year’s Eve festivities on West Seventh Street in downtown St. Paul, Minnesota: Dirty gray snow littered with cigarettes cakes the edges of the city sidewalks, a pedestrian ashtray. The trash cans on the corners have had enough, too; crushed plastic cups spill out of their mouths and lie all around. Cars have been left abandoned and are moored to the curb until their owners return. Last night’s revelers are now today’s stragglers, and downcast people shuffle clumsily along the sidewalks with their jackets and hats pulled down tight, hooded in what appears to be regret, searching for coffee or a way home or something greasy to eat. The streets themselves are no better. The trucks that rattle down the avenues are driven by the blue-collar folks who are made to work while the greater world takes the day off, and they’re pissed about it so they just go right on ahead and crank up the tunes and blow through red lights and say the hell with it.

Then you enter the Xcel Energy Center, home of the Minnesota Wild, and everything changes. On New Year’s Day, the inside of the “X” has the sanctity of a church. The stands are completely empty, every row an unclaimed pew, while the massive rows of stadium lights burn with a celestial glow from up high. Underneath the lights a great stillness rolls down deep from the rafters, cascading down . . . down . . . down . . . until it soothingly washes over all the dark-green seats in the lower bowl. At first, the silence is slightly jarring. This arena, voted best NHL rink by Sports Illustrated in 2006 with a record 230 straight raucous sellouts, is typically throbbing with eighteen thousand Minnesotans, a fan base that is equally knowledgeable and nervy as they pack the stands to support a team and, more important, a town that is desperate for wins.

On Minnesota Wild game days, the X is your typical modern arena, and it becomes a buzzing cauldron of noise: the shouts of beer, pretzels, and peaaaaaanuts pepper the air like buckshot; the metallic wailing of stadium rock peels back the walls and eardrums at nearly every stoppage of play; and overcaffeinated announcers demand the crowd to GET UP . . . AND . . . MAKE . . . SOME . . . NOISE!

But not today. Even the famous lighthouse, the shiny tower encased in glass at the top of the arena that blasts a deafening foghorn when the home team scores a goal, stands silent. Right now everything is clean and bright and in its right place. There’s not a single nacho tray or soda cup littering the ground. The Zamboni quietly slips off the end of the ice, and the freshly cleaned sheet radiates possibility.

The Toronto Maple Leafs are in town to play the Wild the next day, and Leafs players begin to trickle onto the ice for practice.

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