Arena: Ball Arena (1999)

Location: Lower Downtown, or LoDo, Denver, Colorado

Game Attended: January 17, 2022 vs. Minnesota Wild

Game Result: The First Shootout in Tour History, a 4-3 Avalanche Win

Seat Location: Upper Corner, Avs Shoot 2x End

Overall Impression: A Damn Good Impulse Purchase

I still remember March 12, 2020 pretty vividly. I had just returned from an overnight business trip to New York. About 15 people on the flight up from Charlotte, about 25 coming back. LaGuardia Airport was as quiet as it would normally be in the middle of the night. A hospital in Yonkers had just become a “hot zone” with a quarantine initiated.

We were scheduled to fly out on the 13th. Myself, George and his then fiancé Elizabeth, their friends Shannon, Sophie, and Killian were meeting my college friend Julie and her fiancé Dan for the game on the 16th. We’d spend the weekend touring the city and its surrounding sights, enjoying a fun trip in a new place. And then the texts started flying.

“Okay what’s the plan? We need to figure out a go or no go now regardless.”

“Sorry, y’all, I’ve thought a lot about it a lot, and I can’t risk it with my job.”

“I’m probably not going either.”

“The NHL is probably canceled, I’d think we’d get a refund on those tickets as well.”

“We will just call it then, for the safety of everyone.”

About an hour later, both the NBA and NHL suspended their 2019-20 seasons due to the outbreak of COVID-19. Even if we had gone, we’d have not seen the game we’d hoped to see. Episode 22 was canceled. The second official season of the Tour de NHL ended. And we set off in a new era of COVID, quarantines, social distancing, and face masks.

The Tour hit a reset button with “Episode 18.5” in Florida in April 2021, and exactly 20 months to the day that COVID canceled the original Episode 22, the Tour resumed with the new Episode 22 in Chicago.

Now you’re probably wondering about that cliffhanger I left you with at the Episode 24 in St. Louis. Indeed the plane “home” was not a plane home at all. In an eerie repeat of Episode 10 in Detroit, a Sunday snow and ice storm in Charlotte canceled our flight home. Initially we were rebooked onto a Monday morning direct flight, then canceled again and re-routed through LaGuardia to arrive back home Monday night.

So I pulled an Episode 10 and started researching alternate options to have more fun. And over a waffle and some breakfast bowls at the Ballpark Village in St. Louis, Jon and I scrambled our way to new flights, a new hotel, a rental car, and two game tickets for the Monday afternoon bank holiday. And this time 22 months and several hundred dollars later, the original Episode 22 became Episode 25. In the Mile High City of Denver, Colorado. A trip killed by Mother COVID and resurrected by Mother Nature.

So our impulse purchases led to one final train ride in St. Louis and a surprisingly quiet and comfortable (and unfortunately delayed) flight to Denver. We arrived at Denver International Airport to a whimsically musical shuttle tram ride to the main terminal and a puzzlingly slow (and perhaps slightly “medicated”) rental car attendant. So Jon and I looked at each other and probably thought this trip was going to be juuuuuuuuuust a bit unusual. Nevertheless, we pressed on. 

Monday morning, we started on a non-hockey related note. Jon and I are both avid fans of live music, and Denver’s just a stone’s throw away from the world-famous Red Rocks Amphitheatre in nearby Morrison. Ha, get it? A stone’s throw? Red Rocks? (You can go ahead and boo, it’s okay, I’m not a comedian.)

But Red Rocks is really a special place. Opened in 1941, the Amphitheater is an outdoor music venue built into the side of a mountain in the Colorado Rockies. The impressive theater can seat over 9,500 people at over 6,500 above sea level. Two giant red rock formations at stage right and left make it a natural bowl that reverberates the sounds throughout the crowd without the need for tons of amplification. And to boot, Red Rocks is also an 800-plus acre park with plenty of challenging walking and hiking trails. 

Jon hit the nail on the head with this detour: Red Rocks was so cool! We both enjoyed the gorgeous mountain views, sights of Denver’s skyscrapers on the horizon, and even our grueling 1.2 mile, 26-story hike up and down the theater and nature trails. And some of my favorite artists have performed shows at Red Rocks, including U2, John Mayer, and Mumford & Sons. I cannot wait to go back and enjoy some Rocky Mountain music!

But we return to hockey, friends, and after our splurge purchases and our grueling Red Rocks hike, we marched through Downtown Denver to the Ball Arena, located at the southern edge of Denver’s Lower Downtown (or “LoDo”) district. For most of its 22-year life, the building was known as Pepsi Center, and by many locals as “the Can”, an apt homage to its cylindrical shape. It was renamed in October 2020 to Ball Arena after the local Ball Corporation, a manufacturer of recycled metal food and beverage containers. In its early days, Ball Corporation was also the world’s leader in home canning supplies before divesting that business. So from Pepsi to Ball, “the Can” really stayed “the Can”. 

And what a nice “Can” it was! The entrance atriums were nice and open, if not a bit crowded. We stopped into the large and spacious team store for my regular tradition: buying a souvenir puck. I nearly purchased a Wild/Avalnche rivalry puck to commemorate the game but to my surprise, the Avs also sold customizable white and pink Hockey Fights Cancer pucks where you can write in who you fight for. Naturally, that was the obvious purchase for Grandma. 

Jon and I missed all but two minutes of pregame warmups but still had some time to take a lap around the building before the game. I found the arena to be a nice and modern but still slightly boring building. Other than the team store in the atrium, not much stood out save a few things, both on the upper level. We got off the escalator and found an interactive kids’ game similar to the one in the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto. In this version, kids could shoot foam pucks at various targets on a virtual goal on a screen, which was a nice unique feature I’d never seen in an arena before. 

And nit-picking perhaps, but the upper hallways with the concession stands had a cool slanted white roof that reminded me of a Colorado ski lodge. Or even perhaps the Rocky Mountains we just visited. 

But other than the game itself, the highlight of Ball Arena was the on-ice graphics. Before the game, the Avs had an impressive on-ice light show with team logos, player pictures, and even highlights of plays displayed on the full rink. And after the players took the ice, the entire rink lit up as an American flag for the National Anthem. So cool to see many arenas embrace this technology to make for a cool fan experience!

The game itself was a spirited back and forth affair, with the Avalanche capitalizing on back-to-back Minnesota penalties in the first period to jump out to a two-goal lead. During the first intermission, we were treated to not one, but TWO junior hockey scrimmages at each end of the ice!

The Wild answered with an early top-shelf goal in the second but the rest of the period was absent of scoring. There was a fight, however, after Wild forward Jordan Greenway shouldered Avs goalie Darcy Kuemper leading to a defenseman rushing in to protect his goalie by doing his best Conor McGregor impression on Greenway. Kuemper tried to fight through the period but left at the next whistle, likely with concussion-style symptoms. I’ve been there before, trust me when I say it’s not fun. 

At the second intermission, we experienced something never before seen on Tour. Two local junior hockey teams went on the ice, but instead of a normal scrimmage, they participated in a skating relay race. The slaloms, jumps, and dips reminded me of my beginning days on ice in the Developmental League in Charlotte, and it was actually a great race. The team on our side erased an early deficit to pick up the win!

The third period was full of more action, starting with a rather disgusting one timer by young superstar Kirill Kaprizov to tie it at two. The Avs then took the lead on a case of a disappearing puck under the goalie’s leg pad, which then cascaded back across the goal line. To my surprise, the referees called the “blind goal” a goal but Kaprizov is too damn good and potted another to tie it. Following a thrilling but fruitless overtime period, the two division rivals headed to a shootout. Avs winger Mikko Rantanen netted the shootout’s only goal, and we had ourselves a win, so as not to go home from a double Tour trip empty-handed!

We were lucky to sit next to two season ticket holders at the game: siblings Shay and Jake. And boy were they passionate fans! I don’t think there was any way we could convince Shay that Minnesota was nice or that the Wild were also a good team – loved their passion! We ended up joining them and fellow Section 351 fans Scott and Jake at Brooklyn’s Sports Bar, conveniently located across the parking lot from Ball Arena. What a great spot for a postgame beer……or green tea shot……or beer pitcher…..or French fries……or second green tea shot…..yikes. We spent a few hours with our new friends and fellow Avs fans just laughing and enjoying our victorious mood. 

Shay, Jake (x2), and Scott were great fun, and it was fantastic to celebrate with fellow Avs fans and share the story of the Tour with them! I shared that I wear a pink “Find the Cure” wristband to all the games on the Tour to remind me of Grandma’s courageous and successful fights against breast cancer in her life. To my surprise, Jake (Shay’s brother) shared that he also wears a wristband in honor of his grandmother who also fought cancer. Having plenty of extras at home, he graciously offered me the one off his wrist, which was a simple but touching gesture and a reminder that we’re all in this fight together. Thank you Jake!

And while we didn’t get the chance to explore Denver as much as we’d liked following the game (see two paragraphs above, yikes), Jon and I both agreed that Denver reminded us of San Francisco with more mountains and far fewer Golden Gate Bridges. But both felt like proper cities instead of large towns, both felt modern but with some historical charm. Both have their artsy, hipster vibes and breweries and cool gift shops and coffee shops and street murals. And sadly, both had their fair share of homeless populations, likely as the result of expensive cost of living. It’s a sad reality we both noticed in earnest on our way out of town on Monday morning for the airport. 

So in the end, Jon agreed to join me for a hockey trip in St. Louis for a weekend. We ended up getting two trips in four days. We bargained for two flights and 1,200 miles. We got four for nearly 3,000. We bargained for a beer or two with our new Denver friends at Brooklyn’s. We got…….slightly more than one or two. Yikes.

But at the end of the day, a difficult situation for us turned into a magically spontaneous extension of an already great trip. Snow and ice in Charlotte turned into a 60-degree, sunny hike at Red Rocks. Postgame imbibements turned into the single most satisfying Maggiano’s meal of my life at the Dallas / Fort Worth International Airport. And thanks to our flexibility and adventurous spirits, Episode 22 from March 2020 became Episode 25 in January 2022!

And shout out the churros! $3.50 churros! I mean, can you get a better snack at that price? In this economy??

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