It's a Hockey Night in Madison

You don’t realize how small a hockey rink is until you’re there. It looks bigger on television.

Last night Kim and I went up to Madison to see the UW Madison men’s hockey team play Michigan. It was supposed to be a somewhat larger group of us going but events intervened and we’ll just have to do it again sometime later with the full complement of people, but we figured we paid for the tickets and we should go anyway.

It is strange, two years into this pandemic, to be going out anywhere, let alone to a restaurant and then to a stadium. But Madison is the kind of place that takes science seriously and where people wear masks and get vaccinated as a matter of course, so we figured we’d be okay there. And while the restaurant was kind of a mixed bag (you can’t eat through a mask, after all), compliance at the Kohl Center for the game was nearly complete.

Nearly.

Not quite universal, but nearly.

Sigh.

But we wore our masks throughout and that has to count for something.

We got to the Kohl Center rather earlier than we’d planned. Dinner took much less time than we’d budgeted for and walking around on State Street when it is 9F (-13C) with a stiff wind coming off the lake turned out to be less entertaining than we’d hoped. And when the used bookstore we took refuge within closed an hour before the game started, well, we figured at least we’d be warm in our seats.

We were way, way up in the nosebleed section, which turned out to give a pretty good view of the action once it started. We could see the student section and the band clearly and hear them indistinctly – sound tends to get muddled in places like that – but it was obvious they were having a very good time.

This was good because the game didn’t turn out well.

The Badgers outshot Michigan. They had more face off wins. They had more power plays. The goalie actually played pretty well given the caliber of shots he faced.

And they lost 6-2.

But it was an interesting and entertaining game requiring only minor repairs to one of the plexiglass panels rather than the wholesale replacement of one and containing only two game misconduct penalties – both of which were less than when these teams played the previous night. It was a chippy affair.

Getting out of the parking garage was a bit of a trick, but it worked out fine. We made it home and poured ourselves into bed like day old coffee, but it was nice to spend an evening out.

Someday we’ll get to do that more often. Could happen.