A great night of hockey

What a great night of hockey! Ralph, my father-in-law, knows someone who works for the Anaheim Ducks, and he got us four great seats. (Thanks again, Ralph!)

We saw one heckuva hockey game. As I was telling Vandra and my in-laws on the way home - I don't ever remember seeing an NHL game in person with this many fights. There was some awesome action in the first period alone - five full-blown fights, and lots of pushing and shoving. It was very obvious from the first drop of the puck that these were two teams who do not like each other. I can only hope to see Anaheim and Vancouver duke it out in the playoffs, because that would no doubt turn into one memorable series.

Honda Arena is a very nice arena; for being 15 years old, it's a very nice, modern place to see an NHL game. The decor outside of the arena was very, very nice, too; Californians probably take it for granted, but to someone from the East Coast, seeing lots of the palm trees outside an NHL arena was a strange but neat site.

Our only hiccup of the evening was the people sitting behind us. For the life of me, I'll never understand two things: 1. Why people would go to an NHL game and do nothing but talk the game away? And I'm not even referring to chatting about the game, just mundane stuff, and very loudly, and 2. Why when someone politely asks you to please lower your voice (in this case, my wife), what's the purpose of being completely obnoxious in an effort to ruin someone else's evening?

Whatever - it's just a bit of a downer that there are people who are determined to just behave like imbeciles sometimes at public events. The older I get, the more I look back on my youth and realize how ignorant I was at times. Ahh, the perspective of getting older.

The Anaheim Ducks are going to go quite far in the playoffs. They certainly looked very good tonight against a very good Vancouver Canucks team. I was disappointed we didn't get to see Oiler turncoat Chris Pronger play tonight - as much as I dislike him for leaving the Oilers, the man's a demon on the ice, and the hockey fan in me always loves to see a player like that kick some tail on the ice.

Anyway, a great night of hockey. I've now seen an NHL game in 10 arenas. Cool. It's a bit of a bummer this season, though, with the Oilers not making the postseason. Speaking of the Oilers...