Rather than dwell on Thursday's defeat in Game 7, I want to rewind to Tuesday, and end Sabres Season on a high note.
Tuesday night, Game 6 at home against the Carolina Hurricanes. Sabres are down three games to two in the series and facing elimination. I'm at Joe's watching the game with him, his dad, his brother John, and John's friends. Things start off well, Sabres score first, and the period ends with Buffalo up 1-0.
During intermission, Joe looks at me and says, "Let's go downtown and see if we can get tickets off a scalper."
"Are you serious?"
"Yeah!" And off we go. We make it into the city just as the second period starts. No scalpers to be found. Oh well, we'll just park the car and watch it in Dunn Tire Park, the baseball stadium, which is letting people in for $2 to watch it on their big screen. We go in and buy fries and a cherry Coke, sit in the stands and cheer "Let's go Buffalo!" with a couple hundred other fans who weren't able to get tickets to the actual game. The jumbo screen isn't really designed for watching hockey and it's hard to follow the puck, but we sit on the edge of our seats, oohing and aahing and chanting as though maybe if we're loud enough, they can hear us down the street.
Second period ends with the score still at 1-0. About halfway through the third, with the score unchanged, Joe suggests that we make our way down to the arena. It looks as though we might win, and he wants to be there if we do, just to absorb the energy of the crowd as they come out. So we make our way down the street, push into the arena, where the security guards are watching the game on TV's up on the wall, and Rick Jeanneret's voice is booming from the walls. "Can we just stand here in the lobby and watch the rest of the game?" Joe asks one of the guards, and he looks hesistant, agrees but warns that he'll have to shoo us out about a minute before the game ends because of the crowd coming out. About a minute later the Hurricanes tie the game up. Regulation ends with no more scoring, and we're headed to overtime.
For some reason, fans are already leaving. I can only guess that these must be Carolina fans with ESP, or people with nervous disorders who can't stand the tension. Joe wonders to the security guard, if we can get some of these people leaving to give us their tickets, could we perhaps go in to watch the overtime? "We're not really supposed to do that," he says. "But I tell you what." He reminds Joe that a few hundred smokers will be stampeding down in a few minutes for a cigarette break during intermission. If we just become part of the crowd when they all head back to their seats, no one will be the wiser. So that is exactly what we do.
The fans are pretty noisy, nervous and excited. We take seats in the Pour Man's Aud Club, watching people for a few minutes. When overtime starts, we join a crowd standing in one of the doorways, where we can see the Jumbotron. At a break in the action, we switch to a less-crowded doorway, sneaking in far enough to see the ice and the players down below.
At 4:22 into the overtime period, we watch as Briere puts the puck past the Hurricanes' goalie, winning the game for Buffalo and pushing the Eastern Conference Finals series into game 7. The arena explodes as though a bomb just went off. Joe and I scream, he picks me up, twirls me around. We hug and cheer and wave his Sabres hat high above our heads. As we make our way toward the exit with the rest of the fans, even in the lobby it's still so loud that when you scream you can't even hear yourself.
I wished I had a camera when we got to the top of the stairs, looking down at all the people yelling and yelling and waving their white pom-poms on the way out the door. We were still chanting "Let's go Buffalo" and "Ooh! Aah! Sabres on the warpath!" as we got on the Metro Rail, and off, and back to the car. Cars were driving down the streets with people standing up through the sunroofs, whooping and hollering. There was even a guy waving a white pom-pom in the back of a police car (actually... there were probably a lot of those by the end of the night). Horns were blared "Let's go Buffalo!" everywhere you went, and Joe's horn was one of them. I don't know when I've ever seen a whole city on such an adrenaline high.
And so that was the last of it, and now the season is over. It was a great season, it was a great playoff run, it was a lot of fun being part of it. Yay hockey. Yay Sabres. I can't wait for next year! :-)