Perfect cure for a long week

Mid-afternoon on Friday Eric and I discovered that it was a great idea for us to go to the Sharks game that night in San Jose.*

So we did. Eric had driven to work because he had to chaperone a new piece of equipment for his lab and it worked out perfectly for me to ride Caltrain down to Palo Alto so we could drive the rest of the way together from there.

It has been long enough since I have been to a hockey game (almost two years?) that going to this one was unbelieveably exciting to me. It was a total thrill just to be there - and we got to see a great game. One highlight was when Dany Heatly scored three goals, which is a hat trick. As soon as the goal light for the third goal lit up a shower of hats began to cascade down onto the ice. This stopped play for a few minutes while men with shovels attempted to clear the hats from the ice. It was glorious.

This is them picking up all the hats. So many hats! What do they do with them? I don't know. Maybe they give them to needy children?

I texted my brother Andrew that we were in the Shark tank and he left me a voicemail the next day saying he had checked out the game and "was glad to see it looked like we'd gotten a couple of good fights." Apparently, this is a site he checks daily to stay up to date on this sort of critical info. I can't believe I didn't know about this incredible resource.

Overall, I think the thing I was most surprised by is how solid the Sharks fans were. I had this idea that they were some kind of suburbanized half-assed overly-family-friendly "soft" hockey fans - nothing like the Chicago hockey fans I was raised with.

How wrong I was! Well, mostly. The crowd represented with a huge showing of teal jerseys, and every Sharks power play elicited a sea of arms waving in chomping motions. Good show San Jose! That said, I didn't hear any no foul language and there were no fights in the stands, so they still have a ways to go to get to Chicago standards.

I can't wait to go again! They play the Blackhawks in January and it is on the calendar.


*By some cruel stroke of fate, the Bay Area's hockey and soccer teams both play in San Jose rather than a place that it easy for people like us to go see them on a regular basis, like San Francisco.