On Frozen Blog

I got red carpet treatment at Giant Center Saturday night for the Hershey Bears’ in-state showdown with Wilkes Barre-Scranton. The Bears placed me in the television broadcast booth and seated me next to the team’s communications associate, Jess Mikula. Jess keeps track of hits and turnovers during home games and emails the data down to the Bears’ coaching staff between periods. She also writes game summaries for the Bears’ web site, and she generates quality content for John Walton Hockey. Because Saturday night’s opponent was Wilkes Barre, Jess and I agreed to try and inflate the hit count.

Jess and I have become good puck chums in the past couple of weeks, and she’s a fast-rising star in the hockey business. Actually, it was good fun to play a bit of a support role on stats for Jess Saturday night; occasionally she’d ask me for a confirming opinion on the identity of the player who delivered a hit. Mine was a most modest stats role, but nonetheless the first of its kind for a pro hockey game for me, and so good fun.

I’d wanted to attend a pair of Bears’ home dates the weekend before Christmas, on December 19 and 20, but that was Blizzard ’09 weekend along the Midatlantic coast. Back in Washington, we were fairly paralyzed. But up in Hershey the historic hockey town, which like Baltimore got hit harder by that blast than did D.C., they did a public safety assessment and concluded it was simply a snowy night by which to play hockey. So they played hockey. I remember being fairly amazed that Hershey and the Rochester Americans played that Saturday night (Mathieu Perreault scored the game-winning goal in a 5-4 win). Rochester didn’t have any issues with travel that weekend, having arrived in Hershey the night before. The announced attendance on that snowy night was 8,047, but Jess told me that actual fannies in the seats was closer to 2,500.   

And the Bears won the next night at Giant Center as well, 5-1 over Toronto. This was in the infancy of the Bears’ historic 12-game winning streak. Given all the snow that had to be plowed in the Giant Center parking lot, I don’t know where anybody parked that weekend. However, I’ve made enough visits here over the past three or four seasons, in about three seasons of weather, to recognize that were it required of the puckheads here they’d probably leave their cars at home in snowdrifts and take dogsleds to get to the rink.   

With wins on Friday and again Saturday, and an excellent opportunity to prevail again Sunday against a weak Syracuse club, the Bears are separated from a potential 16-game winning streak only by those final 7 seconds Wednesday night in Norfolk, when a John Carlson turnover capitalized upon by the host Admirals unknotted a 3-3 game and ended the historic streak.  

During pre-game dinner Saturday I was afforded an opportunity to listen in on the conversation of a couple of veteran American League reporters about how dominant this Hershey team is this season. In terms of points the Bears’ best season ever was the 114-point club of 2006-07. After Saturday night’s dismantling of Wilkes Barre, Hershey stood atop the East division with 64 points, 16 points better than second-place Albany, and they’re not even at the All-Star break yet. And they have still 38 games to play!

Anyway, it’s rare that you can get even a small group of reporters to agree on the weather, let alone a fantasy-hypothetical like the one proposed at Saturday’s dinner. Here’s what these reporters suggested: take an All-Star assembly of skaters and goalies from all other teams in the East division and skate them in a best-of-seven series against the Bears. Who wins? Sentiment was unanimous that Hershey would — and in a short series.

Deep into Saturday night, after all the other media had cleared out of Giant Center, John Walton and I chatted about the extraordinary strength of this season’s Hershey Bears. Their no. 1, Calder Cup winning goalie from last season, is called away, in mid-season, and perhaps their top two blueliners (Carlson and Alzner) rotate in and out of D.C., while one of their top playmaking centers (Perreault) is called up for a month, and they never see Tyler Sloan, and none of it seems to matter when it comes to the business of winning. I semi-joked with JW that should the Bears add yet another Calder Cup to their American League-best hauling this season Tim Leone would have another book to write — about the greatest five-year stretch of hockey in this storied franchise’s history. Walton agreed.     

Speaking of Leone, the Gabby author today has a 2,500-plus-word feature on Washington’s hockey bloggers and new media’s impact on the sport more broadly in his newspaper, the Patriot News. Tim came down to Washington for a Caps’ game last month and interviewed Ted Leonsis, Mike Vogel, Brett Leonhardt, Eric McErlain, and yours truly, among others. I’m grabbing about a half dozen hard copies of it and delivering them to the Caps and Comcast and a couple of blogger buddies upon my return. I’ll also be returning home with fresh accounts of why every single hardcore hockey fan in D.C. — and most particularly the media who covers hockey back home — needs to get up here and shake the hands of the major league professionals working so passionately for this minor league franchise. Come to think of it, the Hershey Bears are minor league in name only. As are their fans.