Last Night’s Canucks Game

Only two days into my 1001 days and already I get to cross something off my list!

43. take Tod to a Vancouver Canucks game

Last night I took Tod to his first ever Vancouver Canucks game.  Shocking, I know.  He has lived¹ his whole life in BC, most of it in and around Vancouver, without ever having gone to a Canucks game.  Mercifully, this has now been rectified.

You’ll note, however, that I didn’t specify on my list that I would take him to a good hockey game.  You know, like a game in which we wouldn’t have to give our goalie the hook at 3.5 minutes into the game because he had already been scored on TWICE!  Sanford came into replace LaBarbera and soon was inexplicably behind the net with Gionta (a Devils player) putting the puck into the net².  Combine those with the fact that the Canucks let the Devils win every battle for the puck and let the Devils skate around them as if they were a bunch of pylons and it was so bad that the whole stadium booed the Canucks off the ice at the end of the first period!  A little kid a few rows back was heard asking, quite loudly, “Why do they suck so much?”

Thankfully, the ‘nucks came out much better in the second and third periods.  They managed to make a game of it and there was some entertaining hockey to be watched.  Surprisingly, though, there wasn’t a single fight.  I think I’ll have to accomplish #44 on my 101 list (take Tod to a Vancouver Giants game) to see the fighting action. Who knows, maybe we’ll even get to see another full team brawl!

In somewhat related news, when I was telling a friend of mine at work that I’d been at the game last night and mentioned that the Canucks were playing the New Jersey Devils, my friend said, “Oh really? I met a bunch of NFL players from New Jersey on Sunday.”  She meant NHL (but that’s an indication of just how much she’s interested in pro sports) and after a quick look at the Devils’ website, we discovered that she was partying with Dainius Zubrus and Zach Parise that night.  Parise, as it happens, is on my hockey hotties list and it looks like Zubrus needs to be added to my roster!

¹Although whether one can say they’ve truly lived without having been to see a Canucks game is up for debate.
²I miss you Roberto. Please say the rumors that you are coming back tomorrow are true!

Photo credit: Tod Maffin on Flickr.