The Whittemore Center at the University of New Hampshire (photo by yours truly)
Before I get to the body of this post, I would like to take the opportunity to let you know that this is a Unitel Power Post, sponsored by Jewelry Creations of Dover and with special thanks to Margarita’s. We’d also like to thank our local fishery for providing our first goal fish, and take this opportunity to give away a 10 percent off coupon to the Tea Times Inn in Conway to everyone sitting in sections 120, 121, and 122. And students, if you’re sitting in section 112, row H, seat 10, you have just won a piece of pizza from Wildcat Pizza. Wildcat Pizza, where wildcats eat.
Oh, the University of New Hampshire. I’ve been attending hockey games at the “Whit” (UNH’s Whittemore Center) for just about four years, and they always make for an amusing evening. Saturday evening’s BU-UNH tilt, however, had to be the most amusing of them all.
Maybe it was the constant giveaways and sponsorship of every aspect of the game. Every ten seconds, the announcer was giving out something, anything, be it a coupon to an entire section, Timberland gift certificates, a trivia giveaway for a computer – it never ended. They broke the bank with this game. At one point, someone among my trusty seatmates – which included Pin Lady, who is like, my fandom idol – exclaimed, “At this rate, no one will leave empty handed.” In addition, every single power play was sponsored by Unitel, and involved a spiel by the announcer that lasted half of the power play.
Or maybe it was the Mexican Blanket Race, sponsored by a restaurant appropriately named “Margarita’s.” Students dragged each other in “Mexican” colored blankets, wearing sombreros, around the ice, while the Mexican Hat Dance played. I don’t know if it was so much offensive as it was…horribly misguided? A train wreck? I just stared at the race, which took place during the first intermission, in awe. Who the heck came up with this idea?
Or maybe it was the announcer asking the student section if they “bleed blue.” I turned to my partner-in-crime (the fiance) and said, “Isn’t that a serious medical condition? Like, you aren’t getting enough oxygen?”
Or maybe it was the DogPound members behind me in the long line to get up the narrow, steep concrete steps to go over the bridge to get to the narrow, steep concrete steps to the parking lot who changed the lyrics to Hey Baby to, “Heeeey, hey baby/I wanna know/why you don’t make wider stairs.”
Or maybe it was that we all watched Kieran Milan turn into Johnny Curry. For one of the first times since March 2006, the Terriers one a game solely due to goaltending. Was it the win that I was happy about as we shivered in the car as we waited in the long line waiting to get out of the parking lot? No, it was that, like the first time I came up to Durham with my then friend from work and his 16 year old brother back in March 2005, BU had a great goaltender that could save them when they were being covered by defenders like black ice on in the parking lot and penalized like a jailbird. And as my now fiance, future brother-in-law and I huddled in the car and waited for the line to move and the car to warm up enough to turn on the heat, the goaltending was all we spoke about, just like that first time.