On Frozen Blog

There were upwards of 30 minutes worth of pre-game, championship-commemorating festivities in sold-out Giant Center Saturday night, and I wouldn’t have changed a thing about them. The video montage of the Bears’ drama-filled march through the postseason was rendered a “I’d seriously like a DVD of that” by John Walton’s delerium-filled calls of the biggest goals, and I noticed that all of this season’s Bears were seated on their bench taking all of it in in the reverential darkness.
There were some fabulous flourishes to the proceedings, including the return of representatives from previous Bears’ Calder champs, brought out to present rings to the present-day glory earners. There was a player from the victorious ’73-’74 club whose name I don’t recall, the widow of Frank Mathers– the architect of the late 1950s string of Hershey AHL titles — and even Boyd Kane, now with the Philadelphia Flyers.
Mark Wotten, a Bear in June but an enemy Sound Tiger Saturday night, was introduced and wondrously warmly received by Bears’ fans in the stands and his former teammates on the ice. His ex-teammates waited their turn to hug him after he’d been handed his championship ring. That was a stirring experience to witness — emblematic, I thought at the time, of everything that can still be good about contemporary professional sports.

But around 7:00, and with the Bears removed from traditional warmups by at least 40 minutes, I started to think about the distracting and draining effects that always accompany these special evenings and adversely impact the honorees once the game clock commences. The home guys getting honored 99 percent of the time, when the lasers are finished flashing and the honor carpeting is at long last rolled up, offer up pedestrian, plain yogurt play . . . en route to losses. Each Bear was introduced, skated to center ice, and was left standing there to stiffen as the introductions were made and the ring presentations were executed and ultimately the championship banner was unfurled. As they had to. But it was hardly the prescription to ready onesself for a Saturday night showdown with a division rival.
As if on cue, the Bears largely stood still in period one, fell behind, and perhaps, by the time the evening’s shootout rolled around, were simply emotionally spent. Certainly the comments from Coach Boudreau indicated the toll the evening took on him: “I was glad no one was talking to me in the alleyway because I was blithering like a little baby,” he said. “It was pretty good stuff, the memories that flood back when you’re watching that. I thought the Hershey Bears did an unbelievable job in the presentation.”
Or perhaps Bridgeport, who played Friday night while the Bears rested, were just sharper and hungrier.
Still, the Bears battled back from a 2-0 hole and earned a point.
They wore maroon sweaters with collar lacing and the Calder trophy as emblem and the words “2006 Calder Cup Champions” surrounding it. On the sweaters’ rear cuffs were nine images of the nine Calders won. Nifty stuff, but no doubt a not-so-subtle bit of in-your-face, if unintended, inspiration for the visiting Sound Tigers.
You’d have to be a fool to doubt the bond between this team and its community, but compelling fresh evidence of it was on display a full 60 minutes prior to puck drop, when the nethermost reaches of the Giant Center’s sprawling parking lots were crammed with cars.
At evening’s end my buddy and I sat idly in my Jeep for like 45 minutes waiting for a break in the outgoing jam, commenting that this spectacle was seemingly something more appropriate for Daniel Snyder’s Sunday parties, with its 90,000-plus revelers, in Prince George’s County, Maryland. We were in pretty much the same parking spot back in June, for the Calder Finals Sunday night thrashing of the Milwaukee Admirals, and Saturday night we thought it more congested and zoo-like than in the zenith of the Glory Run.
We’d never been so happy to be so trapped.