On Frozen Blog

Maine is a massive state which is massively underpopulated — blissfully so, many of its residents allege. According to 2005 Census Bureau data, the populations of Maine (1,321,505) and Fairfax County, Virginia, (1,006,529) are comparable. Maine’s northern-most county, Aroostook, is so large in sheer size that it betters the combined sizes of all of Maine’s surrounding New England states. All of them. The state religion is Black Bears hockey.

I first visited Maine in the autumn of 2004, partly to take in a Quebec Major Junior Hockey League game in Lewiston featuring the Rimouski Oceanic and a buzz-generator skating for them named Sidney Crosby. I remember first wondering, what is a small southern Maine town (pop. 35,000, approximately) doing with a Q League franchise? Turns out, the town has distinctive French Canadian roots. Your first clue arrives as you pull in to the hockey rink parking lot and notice the name Androscoggin Bank Colisee. Even way up north in New England you don’t encounter too many Colisees.

In the late 1800s, water power from the Androscoggin River spawned a flourishing textile industry in Lewiston that attracted tens of thousands of immigrant workers. The largest concentration of them — 40 percent — arrived from French Canada and resided in a section of Lewiston known as “Le Petit Canada.”

I was startled to learn that Muhammad Ali’s world-famous knockout of Sonny Liston in 1965 took place at Bank Colisee, then known as the Central Maine Civic Center.

What is today known as the Lewiston Maineiacs hockey club was birthed in Trois Rivieres, Quebec, in 1969, where they resided until 1992. The franchise moved to Sherbrooke that year and played ten seasons there before settling in Lewiston in 2003.

The drive from coastal Portland to inland Lewiston requires a mere 40 minutes, but it swiftly delivers significantly deeper snows. Halfway through my commute I notice, for the first time since arriving in Maine late Friday night, groomed snowmobile trails parallel to the highway. As I learned in 2004, one really would prefer to skidoo to Le Lewiston Colisee if one could, as the lone two single-lane exits from its parking lot swiftly make one long for the late weeknight exit experiences from Landover, Md.’s, second-most famous parking lot.

Fourteen dollars puts a visitor pretty much anywhere he’d want to be in Le Colisee, and on this Sunday for its 4:00 matinee between the Maineiacs and the PEI Rocket I’m startled to see the home team warming up in one of the oddest-looking alternative sweaters I’ve ever seen. Knowing that I want to write about this experience, I’m instantly pained by the prospect of trying to describe their appearance. “Maineiacs,” I’ve ever thought since I first heard it, is a clever nickname for the club, moreso perhaps for a hockey club, and their primary logo is modern and impressionistic in a modern sports kind of way.

Anyway, this Sunday sweater is a radical departure from the team’s standard colors. It’s primarily grey, with touches of the team’s more characteristic black and purple, and it bears a simple and yet, to this eye, effective bit of impressionistic sense of the sinister. If one were to imagine older mystery-thriller movies and the poster art representing them, one might seize on the imagery Maineiacs management did in 2003: an exaggerated eye of fury juxtaposed by its squinting companion, and clenched, widely bared teeth completing the visage below.

From the game’s opening four or five shifts, with one of the strongest clubs in all of the CHL skating fast at me in my end section seat outfitted in their novel threads, I develop a guilty desire to peruse the offerings of the hallway souvenir stand at intermission and price this sweater. It’s having that kind of effect on me. I’m also motivated to splurge while thinking that when Reebok is finished squeezing the life fabric out of this particular sweater this summer it won’t look anywhere near as appealing. And lastly, there’s a naughty thought as inspiration: an oversized Maineiacs sweater modeled for me as prelude to lasciviously maniacal behavior one winter weekend night next season. I decide to leave my seat a full minute before the first period ends to shop.

There are no superstar skaters on the Maineiacs, just a lot of fast and talented ones that play exceptionally well together. Their big-name player is goaltender Jonathon Bernier, drafted 11th overall last summer by the Kings. A second-round pick from 2005, defenseman Chad Denney, belongs to the Thrashers.

Attending this game by myself, I’m more attuned to the features of the crowd surrounding me. Maine is a very working class state, and Lewiston, even in its relatively post-industrial existence today, is an especially working class town. All around me are men with hard labor etched into their hands and Maine winter chiseled into their temples, and many of them are attending the game with their wives and small children. A Maineiacs game is very much a family experience; it’s the only game in town, but it’s also the state’s most popular game. There are also lots of teenage Lewiston girls wearing the personalized sweaters of their favorite Maineiacs.

It seems to me that there are four divisions of intermission entertainment within the plexiglass of all levels of pro hockey. The earliest and most basic of course is the simple labor of the Zamboni resurfacing. There are also simple spectator participating contests, such as the fan selected to try and shoot a puck from mid-ice into a small opening in the far-off cage. More elaborate contests often involve multiple spectators on the ice and, in recent years, have for many grown ludicrous and irritating in their inanities. And then there’s the division themed by the team mascot, who merely amuses in basic ways, such as tossing t-shirts into the stands.

“Lewy,” predictably enough, is the name of the Maineiac mascot, and he is in charge of home game intermission entertainment. He is enormous: on skates, perhaps 15 feet tall, swollen and inflated in rubber. His oversized head commands maybe 60 percent of his presence. He delights the Lewiston children of all ages — and most adults, for that matter — with his penchant for smashing his big head into the plexiglass (as a maniac is wont to do), which makes his noggin sway back and forth.

I have no luck at finding the crazy sweater in the hall, but the game is novel in that the Maineiacs surge to a 20-shot lead but remain tied with the Rocket at 2-2. The Rocket uniform irritates me in that its sweater font was seemingly chosen to prevent the seated spectator from deciphering its numbers. There’s a rocket of a left wing for PEI who is either 17 or 77, I can’t tell, but he skates so jet fast that I’m dying to know if he’s anyone’s draft property.

Late third period: it’s 42-10 Maineiacs in shots!, and still they cling to but a 3-2 lead. They hold on and prevail. It’s the regular season’s last home game, meaning . . . Win the Sweater Off the Back of the Player Day. Twenty-plus chances for the guest to secure one! But I can’t. Firstly, I’ve never had an iota of such luck of the draw luck, but I’m also a single-day visitor, as outsider as an outsider gets, and those special sweaters belong on Lewsitonites, I reason. I also want to make it out of the parking lot before the first round of the playoffs starts.

Lewiston is an appropriate stop as my final one on this long weekend of hockey on the road, for within it, like countless dozens of other small-town locales in juniors, pulsates among the patrons’ perfect hockey hearts.

I’ll be back.