On Frozen Blog

A brand new colleague in my office, Victoria, not yet six weeks in her new gig, hails from Gulfport, Mississippi. She’s a young twenty-something, bright and engaging, and while college on the West Coast and two brief employment stints in D.C. have well dulled her Mississippi drawl, it’s still abundantly clear that she’s a seriously southern girl. We’re happy to have her. Like others her age, Victoria enjoys meeting friends after work for cheap beers at happy hour. As you might imagine, her family, most of whom still reside in Mississippi, has zero connection to the sport of hockey. Victoria has a boyfriend named John who hails from Oregon and who works for the Department of Energy, and Victoria has reported to me that he has no interest in hockey whatsoever. All of this made what the two of them did on Thursday rather startling to me.

I pass Victoria’s work station each morning en route to my office. Thursday morning near 9:00 I was startled to see on her computer screen the Washington Capitals’ web site. She was perusing it. Naturally, I asked her why.

“I didn’t make it to a single game last year,” she told me. “I don’t want that to happen again this year.” Victoria the Delta darling was searching the Caps’ site for hockey tickets for her and her boyfriend.

Turns out, Victoria had been to a Caps’ hockey game before, in 2006, during her first-ever visit to Washington. It made an impression.

“It was fast-paced, high energy, and I loved the way the crowd got into it,” she told me.

“I got the bug I think,” she added.

A bug for hockey!, said the Dixie doll. 

Now Victoria’s ticket search became my search on her behalf. Prior to her lone NHL game two seasons back, Victoria had attended a Mississippi Sea Wolves hockey game as a young teenager back home. The Wolves, of the East Coast Hockey League, were once coached by Bruce Boudreau. Fate, I thought.

“That was the first I’d ever seen an ice rink,” she noted with a smile. But it was her experience years later in a big-league rink in the big city that made the lasting impression.

I asked Victoria why she hadn’t made an appearance at a Caps’ game last season, when they’d become so hot a story in town.

“I changed jobs within DOE last year, changed offices, and I was just so busy with all the changes.”

I never push hockey as a cultural experience among my co-workers, but if they stop by my office and ask questions about the sport, I answer, in generous, often gratuitous detail. I’ll give them two-and-a-half hours of my time, if I’m busy, and discuss my game-playing scars, my fake teeth, ‘Slapshot’ and Killer Kaminski. Last season a nuclear engineer from London from our third floor, a very slight former rugby player named Adrian, stopped by my office the morning after watching Alexander Ovechkin for the first time on television.

“You can’t take your eyes off him,” he explained, highly animated, his eyes wide and arms gesturing wildly. “We’d have loved to have had him on our pitch!”

I guided Victoria to the Caps’ ‘Six-Pack’ plans. They seemed budget friendly to a young professional couple. We perused all of the plan options, comparing the ratio of weeknight to weekend games. We decided that the ‘Original Six’ slate was the most appealing, offering as it does both next Saturday’s home opener against the ‘Hawks (sold out) and that snazzy late January Saturday matinee against the Wings.

“Are the Wings good?” Victoria asked me, reminding me, forcefully, of her regional naivete.

She still had to sell the investment to John, but first I wanted to make sure that she could still land that Six Pack, cause I knew tickets were flying fast. I told Victoria to find seats first and make the selljob to John second.

My suspicions were well founded. A Caps’ sales rep informed my Project Puck Convert of that plan’s unavailability. Victoria, I could tell, was close to crestfallen. Now this really became my mission.

“Let me reach out to a friend,” I told her. “No promises, but let me see what I can do.”

Actually, before I could have a phone chat with a Kettler Capitals friend that same sales rep pinged Victoria with the idea of going to the Original Six set but sitting in different seats for the games. Perfect.

“I’ll go with you if John won’t,” I assured.

Victoria’s boyfriend actually put up no resistance at all. In fact, Victoria reported his being excited by the investment.

“He’s excited because I’m excited,” she said.

“Last year, I saw everyone on Metro dressed in their red sweatshirts and their red jerseys,” she explained. “Sometimes, I couldn’t even get on the trains they were so crowded.

“I wanted to be one of them.”

She is.