When I was a youngster, from about '89 to '95, my family had season tickets, so I was a huge UND hockey fan. Dixon Ward, Garry Valk, Brad Bombardir, Toby Kvalevog, Lannnnnn-donnnnnnnn Wilson! and especially Russ Romaniuk....those were my boys! Then we stopped getting tickets, and you know how it is, you get older and discover girls and get a job and suddenly you don't have time to follow every sport as closely as when you're a kid, so I pretty much stopped being a fan of college hockey, and the NHL a few years later. The rosters from Sega's NHL '94 have been frozen as the only relevant hockey rosters in my brain ever since.
But when I found out UND was playing an outdoor game in the College World Series stadium a couple weekends ago, I was intrigued.
Mostly, it was an excuse to go to Omaha, since Gangel and I hadn't seen each other for seven months, when we normally try not to go longer than three months in between visits. Then I found out that Schne, Katie, Kevin, Tom and others were coming down for the game, and it became a slam dunk. I love combining friend groups. Let's watch some outdoor hockey! Wait, there's going to be a tailgate, right? A couple highlights:
- For the second time in my life, an already planned celebration got spiced up by an engagement. A few years ago, we went on a "ski trip" in Colorado (by ski trip, I mean everyone else goes skiing while Sarunas and I booze in the ski lodge) and Alfonso proposed to Katie on the mountain, and we celebrated by drinking 40s deep into the night. This time, Schne proposed to Katie (I have too many friends named Katie, so this one now becomes Katie Schne for purposes of the blog) and we celebrated by getting housed for 23 of the next 29 hours. Heyyyyy, congrats!
- A CWS staple of ours while tailgating is that every time you grab a beer out of the cooler, you have to name a '90s NBA All-Star. "Lemme grab one of those Derrick Colemans"...."Hey, throw me a Tim Hardaway!" etc. etc. You have to spice up all-day boozefests somehow, and if absolutely nothing else, it leads to awesome conversations like "There's no way Hersey Hawkins was ever an All-Star"..."I'm telling you, he was good back in the day"...."Google it!"....."Oh snaps! He had one All-Star appearance, in 1990! Schne's beer is allowed!" A surprisingly fun game.
Anyway, we changed it up this year, and we had to name WWF wrestlers from before the year 2000. It more or less excludes the girls (they don't know much about wrestling, and they only have a brain 1/3 the size of ours....it's science)-- but anytime you can talk wrestling for hours, and get into arguments about the original members of the Four Horsemen....you know it's been a good day.
- I call very few people by their name in real life. Everyone has a nickname, and ipso facto, virtually every name in my phone is a nickname. So it bothered me that my buddy Tom was simply 'Tom' in my contact list, but I had no other nickname for him. On Friday night, he told me a story about one of his friends getting shitfaced, then changing every contact in his phone into a professional wrestler (so brilliant that I'm mad I didn't think of it myself.) So his buddy wakes up the next morning, and while going through his phone, doing the 'what the hell did I do last night?' routine, he realizes that everybody he knows is now named after a wrestler, which means he couldn't tell who was who, and thus had to get everyone's numbers again. I took great delight in that story, and decided to change Tom's name to Razor Ramon in my phone that very moment.
Fast forward to the next afternoon, when I was frantically trying to get a hold of Tom (who works in sports media, and with rumors swirling about the game being delayed, had the inside scoop) and I couldn't find him anywhere in my phone....until, of course, I finally stumble across the name Razor Ramon.
There's something poetic about falling into the same trap that inspired you in the first place. Now at least I remember the connection, and Tom has himself a nickname in my phone.
- Kevin and I started a joke about swapping girls for the weekend, him getting Teens and a lottery-protected draft pick, and me getting his ladyfriend Kayla and expiring contracts. I shouldn't even bring it up, since most of the jokes are horribly inappropriate, and I'm not going to repeat them, even in this blog....just know that I haven't laughed that hard, that much, in quite some time. Things got weird.
- As for the actual hockey game...meh. By that point, I was freezing and double-fisting beers with hot chocolate, Gangel was puking in the stadium and taking naps on Nicole's shoulder during intermission, and the Omaha fans celebrate with cowbells, usually right in your eardrums. At that point, I was ready to get back to a bar, enjoy a few Gary Paytons, and call it good. I'll check back in another 18 years, college hockey. Sioux Yeah Yeahhhhhhh!
- MyShawn's comment about the photo below, which we gave him crap for, but was entirely accurate (paraphrased): "Look at Jum trying to look gangsta at the whitest event in history!"
What can I say? I can't stop looking HARD, just because hockey is involved.
(Also, I enjoy that it's fuzzy, since it's an accurate representation of how I felt at that particular moment.)
