Beautiful St. Catharines, Ontario, former home of…Paul Bernardo…and current home of the Niagara Ice Dogs of the Ontario Hockey League. My trip to St. Kitts started off easily enough. Sure, I hit the disgusting traffic exiting the GTA during rush hour, but I still made it to my destination in an hour. Unfortunately, it was the WRONG destination. The Ice Dogs head office is NOT located at the arena, and I just happened to be sitting in front of the office building by the time I stopped the car. Luckily, the arena was not far off, but it only took me another hour to figure that out!
I was warned that the Jack Gatecliff Arena was really run down (it’s the oldest arena in the league), so I was pleasantly surprised to discover that it wasn’t nearly as bad as they were making it out to be. I’ve definitely seen worse in my day! I got there an hour before the gates opened, so I got a special VIP tour of the facility and all the young men doing their pregame workouts, etc. It’s funny how, “They’re only 17!” can change to, “Well…they COULD be 19!” with but a few sweaty laps around the track.
Before the game started, I had scouted out the usual locations the puck bunnies were said to frequent at this arena. But they didn’t show up. Not even the girlfriends seemed to be in attendance that night. Was the fact that it was a school night a factor in this absence? Have I just lost touch with what modern day, authentic puck bunnies actually look like? Or is there another reason for the scarcity of puck bunnies at the three OHL rinks I have visited this season? These are the questions and topics I will be addressing as Puck Bunny Month continues. I want answers!
There was actually one question that I posed in an earlier post about the effect the lack of puck bunnies would have on this new wave of junior hockey players. Junior hockey clubs like to celebrate scholastic excellence in their players. Last night, they honoured Freddie Hamilton, one of two Hamilton brothers on the Ice Dogs team for his overall, COMBINED average for his most recent term in high school. The kid’s effing average was ninety-eight percent, putting his brother’s ninety-seven to shame! HOLY FUCK! I think we just discovered one of the MANY byproducts of puck bunny scarcity. Nothing to screw? Let’s do homework instead!
The game itself was full of drama. Exactly twenty seconds into the first period, a hard check into the boards caused a panel of Plexiglas to come loose. Twenty minutes later it was finally fixed. And that wasn’t the only mishap of the game. With 13:06 left in the third, the power completely went out. It was actually pretty amusing to see how quickly people whipped out their cell phones and started waving them around like they were at a rock show. Eventually, the fans hurled their Great Wolf Lodge squishy pucks onto the ice in protest. I was OUTRAGED. Back when I worked for MLSE, we has a few of those squishy stress pucks floating around the office, and we used to fight over them These people clearly did not understand the value of the squish.
The Dogs were only up 2-0 at the time of the outage, so with over thirteen minutes to go, it wasn’t fair to the Gens to call it because ANYTHING can happen in that kind of time. Not to mention the fact that the OHL playoffs begin in a few short weeks, and both teams are battling for a spot. The commissioner said if the lights weren’t back on at 10:30 PM the game was going to be called. At 10:29 PM on the nose, God said, “Let there be light!” And the game was to resume. However, the power had been out for almost an hour at this point, and all but maybe a hundred people had bothered to stick it out.
With the excess removed from the stands, it was easy to see the handful of puck bunnies that had been camouflaged before the blackout. But still, the girls had no game. One group was complaining because the players had been sent back to the locker rooms, and they felt that during this time of uncertainty the players should have either just been skating laps around the rink looking for them pressed up against the glass, or actually walking around on foot (making them easy targets). Another group had baked cookies, but got so excited about the fact that they could sit ANYWHERE now that everyone had left, that they started to cry. Sitting RIGHT beside the bench was too much for them to handle, and they vacated immediately. I just sat their shaking my head, “No game; no game at all!”
This power outage was the best thing that could have happened to a puck bunny. Not only could you sit wherever you wanted when the game resumed, but the players were given another warm up! Two warm ups in ONE game, that’s puck bunny heaven if I ever heard of one. But these young pucks just didn’t know how to properly utilize the situation. Granted the Ice Dogs have only been calling the Niagara region home since 2007, but come on! Am I just the most lethal puck bunny that ever lived? Not in the sense that I am one, but in the sense that after years of studying the most extreme cases, have I managed to put together the most deadly game plan around? And why have I never used it? Perhaps, my next book should be a self-help book for aspiring bunnies.
Maybe you are thinking that I’ve lost my touch. Maybe these girls I identified as puck bunnies, aren’t actually puck bunnies. Shall I now direct your attention back to the top photo. The sign says, “I want a Gen in my underwear.” Wow. I didn’t make that sign. A threesome of pucks were holding it up all game. They had made the trek to St. Kitts from Oshawa, and let me tell you, that’s quite the hike for a bunch of young drivers. When the game ended, they discarded the sign, which gave me the opportunity to steal it, and take a picture with it. No…we didn’t fish it out of the garbage or anything… Oh, the things I’ll do for a laugh.
Roll the credits…
(Alexisonfire another product from St. Catharines, Ontario)
