At least you could mute the TV. :) Tony and I got way more than enough
being there at the games in person this weekend, to the extreme that he
heard pep band members whistling it in the men's room. As much things as
people have said recently about North Dakota, I would still rather they
win that semifinal so that we aren't tortured a second time as well in St.
Paul. :)
As far as a trip report, it wasn't much of a trip for us, since we live 20
miles from downtown St. Louis. :) So I can't really report on hotels,
having never stayed in them here. Scottrade Center was nice on Friday and
let people get their hand stamped to leave in between games, as they did
back in October for the Icebreaker, so we weren't trapped eating arena
food for dinner. We walked over to Union Station a couple of blocks away
and grabbed something from the food court for dinner. We went back there
to one of the sit down restaurants on Saturday to get dinner before the
final game. We have our various places within a mile radius of the arena
that we like to park for free and walk over :), but with the snow on
Saturday, we did suck it up and pay the $10 to park in the garage
connected to the arena.
As I said in my earlier post, I certainly love it when college hockey
comes to me in St. Louis and I get to see more games in person (especially
when it involves my team :) ) than our now annual trip to the Frozen Four.
However, both tournaments we went to this year (Icebreaker and West
Regional), they had the upper bowl completely closed off and there were
still lots of empty seats in the lower bowl. Someone made a joke on
Twitter about all the Michigan fans dressed in blue disguised as seats.
The Blues are doing better in recent years at getting people in the seats
(St. Louis sports fans are very fair weather, and if the team isn't doing
well, they don't go to games and then gripe about it being blacked out on
TV), but there's still not a large college hockey interest among the
locals. The Blues advertised like crazy that week that their top 2010
draft pick Jaden Schwartz would be in town playing and that great seats
were still available, but it didn't seem to help attendance much. There
were some people there for each school, but don't know how many were
locals and how many actually travelled. We did talk to a group of CC fans
in the next section over, who turned out to be captain Ryan Lowery's
family who came to see him. I remember their big news angle about the
Icebreaker tournament in October was that Andy Murray would be in town for
the first time since the Blues fired him 9 months before, to see his son
play for Wisconsin. We actually ran into him and his wife walking over to
the arena before the games and talked to him for a minute. :)
Looking forward to seeing everyone in St. Paul in a week or so!
Karen Shadwick
Colorado College '95
[log in to unmask]
On Mon, 28 Mar 2011, EPS wrote:
> Glad to know I wasn't the only one thinking this!
>
> I was at the 2008 Frozen Four, so I can relate, since both teams were there
> that year as well. I was also at the West Regional with Notre Dame (so I saw
> them in all four play-off games that year). The relentlessness of the bands
> playing those two fight songs was enough to make me swear off hockey pep
> bands for good! (I never thought I'd prefer piped in music to live band music
> at a game, but I changed my mind after that year.) I admit that I even had to
> mute the television whenever Hail to the Victors came on this weekend.
>
> --Erin
>
> -----Original Message----- From: Mark Lewin
> Sent: Monday, March 28, 2011 8:52 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: one more comment from a couch potato
>
> One more thing I forgot:
>
> Sincere condolences to those who will attend the Phrozen Phour.
>
> It will probably be mid-May before you can get BOTH the Notre Dame fight
> song AND Hail To The Victors out of your head
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