It's always fun to watch a hockey game in an Original Six city.

But when the Stanley Cup playoffs roll around, the excitement level jumps up a few notches.

The city of Toronto has gone two years without a playoff series, so the big T.O. is brimming with pride now that the Leafs are in the Conference Finals. That exuberance showed on Saturday night when the Leafs took on the Pittsburgh Penguins in Game 5 of their playoff series.

Zippy and Matthew and myself wanted to see the playoff atmosphere in a real hockey town up close, so we took a trip north of the border for the fifth game.

Ok, so the real reason we went to Canada was to visit our good friend Dom Giagnocavo, who is a living legend in the town of Stratford, but it was cool how the Pens-Leafs series coincided with our visit.

Being from Pittsburgh, we really never experienced playoff hockey as it should be seen. Canadians, and Toronto natives in particular, really know how to watch a hockey game. Pittsburgh fans, while loyal, really don't get into games as much as they could. With the high cost of tickets at the Civic Arena, the fan base has shifted from "Bubba," who enjoys an Iron City beer and some flaming nacho cheese sauce at the game, to "Buffy," who wears pretty mink coats and just doesn't quite understand the concept of icing just yet. The result is a quiet, almost catatonic crowd that goes to games more to be seen than to be heard.

In Toronto, it has always been a different story. All types of people go to the games, and all are knowledgeable hockey fans. You hear more talk of how a certain breakout isn't working than an interpretation of an icing call.

Unfortunately, there's another difference between Pittsburgh and Toronto fans when it comes to hockey. In Pittsburgh, a college student can walk up to a ticket window before a game and get the best seat still available for 16 bucks. A great deal, no matter what city you're in.

But in Toronto it's a different story. The fans know good hockey when they see it, so most seats are snatched as soon as they go on sale. This means the only way you're going to get a ticket is through the friendly neighborhood scalper. As the games get more important, the scalpers get less friendly. We found this out outside the Air Canada Centre, as tickets were going for more than $125 for the cheapest seats in the house.

With our limited budgets, we decided against giving Mike the Ticket Guy our money and did the next best thing: We watched the game in a local sports bar with the rest of the ticket-less folk in Toronto.

Upon arriving at the Sports Front Bar & Grill, we knew it was the place to be. Four big screen TVs were waiting for us to enjoy the game. And when the theme song from Hockey Night in Canada began, so did the magic.

Believe it or not, people were singing along with the theme song. Where else could you find that? And when Don Cherry came on, the place was just about as quiet as church.

Of course the loud roars from the crowd came when the Leafs scored, but bigger ovations came whenever a hit, or punch, was landed on Matthew Barnaby, when the cameras caught a shot of Jaromir Jagr's temper tantrum after taking a penalty, and when I won a T-shirt after answering a trivia question right during the second intermission.

But the biggest ovation was, believe it or not, not hockey related. It seems someone brought their own remote control and turned off the NBA playoff game that was on one station before the hockey game and tuned into a porno channel. It was a pleasant surprise for most male hockey fans in attendance, but I'm sure some parents had a lot of explaining to do with their kids, who were enjoying dinner at the time of the incident. I guess they have to learn about the birds and the bees sometime...

After the Leafs won, the sights and sounds didn't stop. We left the bar after the Leafs won and headed back toward the arena. People filled the streets and waived their Leaf banners and started chants of "Go Leafs Go!" And once people got back into their cars, they drove around the city blowing their horns and breaking various traffic violations by standing up in their sunroofs and yelling at people walking up and down the streets of Toronto.

Porno aside, the experience of watching a Stanley Cup playoff game in an Original Six city was simply amazing. The people of Toronto knew how to watch a hockey game. They knew when to cheer a great play and when to get worried for their beloved Leafs.

These are lessons that all new hockey fans should learn. Perhaps it should be required that all fans in expansion cities like Nashville, Columbus and Atlanta travel for one weekend to Toronto to see how hockey should be watched and cheered. It wouldn't hurt. It might even bring an appreciation to the sport that so many newer fans to the game have been missing.

[ issues | nhl archive | home | nhl history | about us | search | comments ]