I recently lost a good friend. Men and women I’ve known since we were boys and girls poured into my Minnesota hometown for the funeral last Friday, some from as far away as the coasts. Outside the church, at the crack of the rifles for his military honors, a tear ran down my cheek and promptly froze into the upper reaches of my beard. He will be greatly missed.
Mitch had been a staple at a longstanding tradition amongst a group of his peers: hockey weekend. This tradition entails everyone meeting up from wherever they’ve ended up in the country then going somewhere for the weekend to attend a Minnesota college hockey game (not necessarily in Minnesota, the Dakotas and other nearby states are in the mix too). We also gear up like old times and attempt to play a hockey game ourselves.
Since we’d planned this year’s hockey weekend for the Twin Cities several months ago, and since almost everyone going was at the funeral anyway, we decided to go ahead with it. In the past, outdoor ice conditions had occasionally prevented us from doing the amateur hockey game part of hockey weekend. Though we are all citizens, the skin tones of a couple of our buddies nonetheless served as a compelling reminder that outdoor ICE conditions in the Twin Cities merited a postponement of that part of the tradition.
We would still watch a college hockey game, though. This year we were traveling to the St. Paul campus of my old law school alma mater to see its brand new stadium.
Of course, a dozen hockey hooligans need a hearty meal and a few rounds with which to toast their fallen compadre before watching any competitive athletics. We headed to Tiffany’s (the local sports bar, not the fancy jewelry store).
We arrived at sunset to the large four-way intersection where Tiffany’s is. A group of several hundred anti-ICE protesters braved the cold to gather there. Wanting to show my support (especially given that a little toasting had already taken place), as we crossed at the stoplight I formed a megaphone with my hands and yelled as loudly as I could, “FUCK ICE!!”
My breath boiled from my body and whipped away in the wind. The intersection was big enough that it took a couple seconds for the sound to reach every corner, and for the applause and cheering to make its way back to me. Encouraged, I reared back again, and this time bellowed, “FUCK BOVINO!!”
It was a cool moment. As I write this two days later it still sounds like I’ve been taking voice lessons from RFK Jr. whenever I try to speak — totally worth it.
When we finally arrived at the game (a little late for puck-drop), another wave of sound hit us as we found our way to our seats. We assumed the home team had scored a goal, only to discover it was the visiting fans of the Michigan Tech Huskies who’d generated such a robust roar.
This was not an isolated incident. Lots of Michigan Tech students made the long journey to cheer on their team. On the other hand, I saw almost no one who wasn’t on the ice who I’d take to be student-aged wearing a Tommies jersey. Most of the hometown fans seemed to be stoney-faced older white men. Though the hockey was competitive, the energy advantage was overwhelmingly in favor of the Huskies.
It probably didn’t help that the stadium was half-empty. It was a beautiful building, though one, as we soon discovered, in which an attendee of the proper age had no ability to purchase an alcoholic beverage. To see a hockey arena without beer in Minnesota was almost akin to encountering a panda bear on the streets of St. Paul: the vague familiarity of the shape isn’t necessarily out-of-place, but the overall picture is uncanny and somehow wrong.
I took a walk to clear my head and find the manager in charge of the Jumbotron to see if he’d flash “Goodbye, Mitch” briefly on the screen. This request was denied.
I mean, fine, it’s not the end of the world, but I wasn’t asking for a 10-minute video tribute or anything. Two words of text for a few seconds didn’t seem completely unreasonable as a favor to an alum who’d walked in accompanied by a meaningful percentage of the whole crowd at $35 a ticket. I could have missed it, I suppose, but as the game went on I saw no acknowledgement of the other two great Minnesotans we lost this month either, whereas an earlier event that day at the History Center in St. Paul that a few of us had planned on going to was canceled entirely due to the federal occupation of the metro area.
By the time we left the game (early) I found myself cheering for the Huskies. I spent about a week in Houghton versus three years in law school, and by the end this hockey game caused me to shamefully pocket the St. Thomas stocking cap and mittens I’d been wearing.
Well, all things considered it was a great weekend which featured a lot of great tributes to my friend, and which could have turned out a lot worse considering how masked federal goons have been needlessly abusing protesters and bystanders alike in the Twin Cities these past few weeks. Still, that hockey game was a definite lowlight. Hopefully next year we’ll be somewhere else for hockey weekend, maybe with something to celebrate instead of someone to mourn, and maybe even in a city that isn’t besieged by the federal government.
Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.
The post Visiting My Old Law School In The Twin Cities To Mourn A Friend And Curse ICE At A Soulless Hockey Game appeared first on Above the Law.