Pantywaist goes to hockey game

Once a year my brother-in-law gives the family tickets to a Wild game. We all look forward to it. Hockey is beautiful and exciting. Xcel is a great place to see a game. And the whole experience is other-worldly, not just being surrounded by space aliens, but actually visiting their planet.

This year, as usual, the four of us were the only people in the arena not wearing Wild paraphernalia. And this year, as usual, the greatest pleasure for the 12- and 14-year olds was eating the kind of food they don't get at home. Both boys were done with their Philly cheese steaks before the Star Spangled Banner began, and no, they didn't care that their sandwiches bore no relation to what's served in Philadelphia, or that the cheese glopped over it was mostly vegetable oil with artificial coloring.

A few minutes into the first period, there was a fight. Not a little fight, but the kind where the referees stand aside and let the two guys go at it. The St. Louis Blues player lost his helmet, so his head served as a punching bag for the Wild player. It was probably 60 seconds; it seemed like ten minutes. It was unpleasant.

Not so much because I expected the punchee to start bleeding from his ears and be carted off to die in some green-tiled, fluorescent-lit St. Paul emergency room. But because the crowd cheered every punch, standing and screaming with pleasure, so excited that they might even have spilled some of their beer.

"Watch out," you're thinking, "he's going to make a last-days-of-Rome reference." No I'm not. The cheering needed no tired similes; it was horrible enough on its own. The 12-year old, who spends every waking minute splattering the brains of opposing Call of Duty soldiers against the concrete block walls of nameless Eastern European cities, all the while chortling "head shot" into his headset, was visibly upset. He'd never seen real grownups really fighting, he didn't like it, and he particularly didn't like that thousands of people loved it. The 14-year old asked why they allowed it. "Because everyone loves it," I said, "look around you."

Oh well. The rest of the game was filled with dazzling skating and shot-making. The boys recovered sufficiently to each eat a pizza at the beginning of the second period. The Wild won. We all went home feeling we'd had a cultural adventure. We were exhausted in a good way and, at the same time, excited, so excited that we had huge fight in the car over how to pronounce Guayaquil.

Now there's something worth fighting over. I think if we'd been on skates, there might have been a death or two.