Our local minor league hockey team, The Portland Winterhawks, had their season opener last night. For some reason, as they did last year as well, all thier home games will be at the Veterans Memorial Coliseum, not at the Rose Garden. For those of you who don’t know, the Coliseum is old and busted. They have pictures of the Beatles playing here, and I’m talking the early, cool Beatles, not the hairy hippy Beatles. Anyway, the Rose Garden is fairly new. It’s nice, it’s got bigger, more comfortable seats, and the beer tastes good there. Oh, and they have the normal giant working Jumbotron. The Coliseum, however, does not. The beer always tastes like crap. And for some reason, their premium beer is some form I don’t like. The seats are old wooden pieces of shit. Their tron used to be just a crappy light board. This year, they advertised, and even mentioned before the game, their new, upgraded screens with a video replay system.

And here inlies the problem. The screen still blows. It would have been a shitty screen 10 years ago. And as for the video replay (you know, so you can see a couple shots of the goal that was just scored, or the badass check that put the guy through the glass?), well, I don’t even think any of them knew how to use it. It barely got used. I only saw about two replays, and it was only for a couple checks. No goal replays. No fight replays. No penalty reviews. So…..why do we have this new replay system?

Now, lets get back to the game. The game was against the Vancouver Giants, last years conference champions. Since I wasn’t all too enthuesed about drinking their crapass generic beer, nor did I want the microbrew available, I went beerless for the first period (a major rarity for me). We scored first. They scored second. We scored third. Then, for the rest of the game, they scored, scored again, and again, and again, and again. And really, the score didn’t bother me. My problem was that I came to watch hockey.  Except for the visiting team, I didn’t see much hockey. I saw an absolutely worthless game. People not passing, not getting it out of the zone when they had the opportunity. At least their were a couple fights that didn’t immidiately get broken up (as many, many others did).

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Categories: My Weekend, Rant
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