You need a good reason to brave near-freezing New Year’s Day temperatures, perhaps nursing a hangover, and trek all the way out to a baseball stadium.
Like ice hockey, played outdoors.
Nearly 43,000 fans did just that on Thursday to watch the hometown Washington Capitals beat the Chicago Blackhawks 3-2 at Nationals Park, home to Major League Baseball’s Washington Nationals.
That is well over double the maximum capacity of 18,500 at the Capital’s usual home ice, the downtown Verizon Center, and symbolic of the popularity of open-air professional hockey.
“We play hockey in baseball stadiums because we can,” said Matthew Tucker, 23, sporting a red Capitals jersey as he hung out with friends — Blackhawk fans, actually — before the match.
“If you get back to the roots of the game, you played outside,” added Tucker, who grew up playing hockey on frozen ponds in upstate New York.
Most NHL games unfold in comfortable heated indoor arenas, with the gladiatorial action playing itself out on pristine artificial ice.
However, the Winter Classic, played every New Year’s Day since 2008, has become the NHL’s marquee event.
That is special, given that the finals for NHL’s Stanley Cup championship typically go into mid-June — two months into the Major League Baseball season.
The weather at Thursday’s game was chilly, with bright blue skies and 6oC at the opening face-off, but not a deterrent for fans.
For many Americans in northern climes, near-freezing temperatures are par for the course for football in the run-up to the Super Bowl, which falls on Feb. 1 this year.
The Winter Classic is “an event that real fans go to,” said Blackhawks fan James Felke, 30, who made the trip down from Chicago for his third outdoor NHL experience.
“To brave the elements,” added his companion Molly Dudas, 26, as they discreetly polished off a tiny pre-game flask of cheap whiskey.
Capital fans vastly outnumbered their Blackhawks rivals, although they were united in the color of their respective teams’ jerseys, turning Nationals Park into a sea of crimson in the afternoon sun.
For anyone used to indoor hockey, where seating begins at rink side and the acoustics amplify the roar of the crowd, Thursday’s Winter Classic was a bit of a culture-clash experience.
Center ice was located around where second base would be on a baseball diamond, leaving a wide chasm between fans and players — a vacuum filled to a meager extent by the stadium audio system relaying the sounds of skates, sticks and pucks.
A US flag as big as the rink itself was unfurled for the playing of the US national anthem, as fireworks shot up high into the sky and two US fighter jets performed a screaming fly-by.
Live entertainment veered wildly from 1980s punk-pop star Billy Idol doing Rebel Yell before the game, to a US military choir belting out The Army Goes Rolling Along at the second intermission.
The players, in vintage uniforms, took to the ice via a scale-model replica of the US Capitol and a miniature, frozen Reflecting Pool.
Concession stands offered pretzels and cotton candy. The stadium’s branch of Washington’s iconic Ben’s Chili Bowl diner quickly sold out its signature dish.
The rink itself was the product of 75,700 liters of water, kept frozen by one of the world’s largest mobile refrigeration systems.
Tickets for Thursday’s game sold out long ago at between US$79 and US$349 a pop — and remained almost impossible to score at the last minute from illegal ticket sellers outside the main gate.
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