Sporting memories: Aggressively cheering for the visiting team when the Hurricanes moved to my state

It was where I went to college in North Carolina. I didn't really follow ice-hockey at all and my only real exposure to how the game even works was a couple of Playstation games that a couple of friends and I would play in our downtime. It took me a while to understand that "icing" rule and before playing a video game I wouldn't have even know why play was stopping. Basically you can't pass the puck beyond the near central blue lines past the back blue line without a penalty.

I don't know why this rule was introduced by perhaps to prevent people from just clearing the shit out of pucks out of their own defense.

When the Carolina Hurricanes first moved to North Carolina from I believe it was Harford, which is somewhere up in Canada, I wouldn't say that the people of North Carolina were massively excited about it. The team didn't even have their own dedicated stadium and this leads me to believe that they weren't really sure about the deal actually going through.

They played at stadiums that were multi-purpose back then and after the ice hockey games they would clear out the ice and use it for something like a monster truck rally - which is far more popular in NC than ice-hockey ever will be.

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They've got their own stadium now and have for many years but this is going back a while to the later 90's when they first moved to near where I went to college. The tickets were very inexpensive because the population simply wasn't all that interested in going. When I went with a pal of mine I wasn't super enthusiastic about going but he had two ticket and no car and I had a car but no tickets. So I figured "what the hell? Let's do it!"

As it turns out this friend of mine that I had known for many years was an avid fan of the sport but he just never talked about it because nobody else really cared, including me. He wasn't a fan of the home team Hurricanes though, he was a New York Rangers fan... to the point that he had two full-size jerseys in his apartment and we both donned them for the game.

I don't know what happened to us in the car on that day on our roughly 90 minute drive from where my college was to where the stadium was, but during that time I developed and intense dedication to the New York Rangers despite the fact that I knew nothing about the team or even anyone that played for them.

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This is not us. Thankfully this was during a time when very few people had cell phones and if you did have one it didn't have a built in camera with HD video recording available. I thank my lucky stars that I grew up when I did because on days like the one I am describing now, we definitely would have ended up on the wrong end of at least a TikTok video and probably would have lost our jobs or something.

There were kids in attendance, so we kept our language PG-13 (we aren't complete scoundrels) but we relentlessly heckled the Hurricanes and some of the Canes fans during the game. We were back in the cheap seats and the game only had about 20% capacity so we didn't even get into trouble. I would imagine that these days with everyone being as sensitive as they are, that we probably would have had at least a steward come by and tell us to cut it out.

I remember shouting "Primeau is a pansy!" over and over again and when I think about that I just cringe but then again, I'm pretty sure we all did something or lots of things that were exceptionally stupid when we were in our early 20's.

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By the look of some of those ladies' hairstyles I am going to guess that this image is probably from around the timeframe that I am talking about. Keith Primeau is regarded as one of the best players to ever play for the Canes. I believe he was the captain but I'm not really an ice-hockey fan so I am not sure about that. The point is that me and my silly friend who were probably the only people in the stadium that were wearing Rangers jerseys, were shouting out his name on a regular basis.

I recall that somewhere in the 2nd period that Primeau scored a goal and a lot of the otherwise very well-behaved Hurricanes fans turned around to shout things at me and my friend and well, we didn't have a lot to say back about that. We weren't looking for a fight, we were just being jackasses. The Rangers ended up losing that game by at least 2 goals so we walked out of there with our heads held kind of low. I think we should thank the local fans, who were actually our own people, for being as kind to us as they were because elsewhere in the world I think our raucous behavior would have resulted in someone attacking us or at least "accidentally" spilling a beer on our heads.

Despite now living in a city that has an NHL team in a stadium that I can easily access from my apartment I have only ever been to one home game. The sport just doesn't appeal to me as much as a sport needs to for me to spend the $100 dollars or so that it costs to get "nosebleed" section tickets. Of course the population difference of Chicago vs Raleigh, North Carolina is pretty immense, yet the stadiums are roughly the same size. Both stadiums seat around 19,000 people and while that might be just fine for Raleigh at a population of 475,000, in Chicago having the same amount of seats for roughly 3 million results in there being a crazy demand for tickets here. Keep in mind that the 3 million is only the metro area, if we include all the surrounding areas of Chicago that number easily doubles.

So I don't go to ice hockey games anymore and the one that I went to with my friend to heckle the home team is 50% of all the professional ice hockey games that I have ever been to. I'm glad we went, but I roll my eyes a bit when I think about how we had behaved.

In a way I am kind of glad that the Rangers didn't win because at least that shut us up. If they had won we might have gotten ourselves into some trouble for being loud on our way out the door.

Have you ever acted like a jackass at a sporting event? This is only one of maybe three times that I have if we don't include the times that I was actually playing on one of the teams at the events. If we include those, well, my number of times goes up dramatically. :)