Salvas: A Bad Outcome in Boston, But a Great Night with My Son
Avs stumble, but to a 6-year old with a warm-up puck, that doesn't matter.
Well, for the third year in a row, my presence brought the Colorado Avalanche no luck in Boston. Another season and another loss in Beantown surrendering five goals to the Bruins.
This year was different than the last two times, though.
In 2022, it felt like a massacre in a 5-1 loss. And although the score was the same again last year, it felt a bit closer than the four-goal difference in the box score. Last night was a 5-2 defeat at the hands of the B’s, but it was a fight until the end.
It hurts when you find yourself just getting settling into your seat to watch the game and you are already behind 1-0. Cale Makar getting stripped of the puck on the early stage of a breakout attempt ends up getting immediately deposited into the back of the net by David Pastrnak.
I immediately began to think, “Not again..”
The bad start rolled on as the Avs trailed by a pair after the period with Boston scoring two more goals sandwiched around Miles Wood’s eighth of the season. The confidence of the fans in the seats next to me was high — and warranted — but I had to remind them that Colorado leads the league in comeback with this season. They had no idea, but weren’t worried after watching the Avs play that first period.
They weren’t wrong.
Despite a much better second period from the boys in burgundy and blue, this was another night in The Hub that was not meant to be as Pastrnak added a power-play goal and empty netter in the final minutes to seal the game with a hat trick.
Look, I'm not happy we lost… by any stretch. For those of you who have had the pleasure of driving into Boston at any time of day, you can understand what goes into getting into the city for a Bruins game. I sat in traffic on three different highways before even getting onto the city streets and the parking garage located under the TD Garden. Enduring all the BS of getting in and out of the Garden can be alleviated with a win. No win and a lackluster effort can make it so mind-numbingly frustrating.
However, the saving grace in last night and in last year’s loss was getting to take my son, Blake.
At six years old, I would venture to guess that Blake is the only kid his age in the state of New Hampshire who knows the entire Avalanche roster. Sometimes the new guys need prompting as we’re learning who Jason Polin is. And sometimes he references Joel Kiviranta as ‘the player with the funny name.’ But he sure knows the star players and he really loves the team.
An east coast game affords him the opportunity to stay up and watch the first period of a 7 p.m. start on school nights. A weekend game — like the Maple Leafs game last Saturday night — earns him two periods before bed with the promise that the first thing I tell him in the morning will be the final score and the goal scorers.
My wife often tells me that she picked up on my love for the Avalanche early on in our dating period. She will continue that had she known the full extent of said passion back then that things might have turned out differently for us.
But here she is 15 years later with a husband who watches every game start to finish regardless of where we are (weddings be damned) and now a son named for a player with the blossoming passion for a team 2,500 miles away just like his father. She’s a great and understanding partner.
That’s what makes nights like Thursday so special for a family with a now shared love of this team. Only once each season, we get to go and see the players and coaches that dominate topics of conversation in our house for 11 and a half months a year in person. We could realistically make it to Montreal or one of the New York Metro teams, but making that work with two little kids and two working parents isn’t likely.
So Boston is the only place we get to experience the Avalanche live and we try to make the most of it.
Despite traffic, Blake and I arrived early and found our seats on the ninth floor. Blake wearing his Nathan MacKinnon Stadium Series jersey he got for Christmas three years ago, still too big for him, but draped over him with pride for his player and team. We tried on a kids Joe Sakic jersey, too, but he insisted that I wear mine so we each had the sweaters of our favorite players on.
He didn’t want to go down to the ice level for warmups, saying that he wanted to stay in his seat and watch from up high. After a day of work and two hours of driving to get him at school and then into that godforsaken hell hole of criss-crossing overpasses and pothole riddled highways, I said that Daddy gets to make the call. We were going down to the lower bowl to watch.
After a pretzel for him and a hot dog for me, I forked over my $33 and we headed to the glass. Some of the bigger kids and adults (...ok…) holding signs made sure to make room for the little guy along the glass, even swapping places with him so their signs begging for pucks didn’t block his view. Several times he turned around in an attempt to show MacKinnon the back of his jersey hoping for a response I told him would not likely come.
I took my spot in a seat a row behind to watch him wave adorably at players as they skated by. He tried to tell Mikko stretching in front of him that he was his little sister’s favorite player or inform Devon Toews that his mommy and daddy also went to Quinnipiac.
When given the option of which of his Avalanche hats he wanted to wear to the game, he picked the Altitude Sports hat I won in a trivia contest at a December 2017 game against the Panthers on the Ball Arena concourse. On the bench for warmups, Marc Moser saw the hat turned around as Blake pressed his face to the glass and gave me a wink and a thumbs up. I assume he took Blake’s brand loyalty of broadcasting as great parenting on my part.
At the conclusion of warmups, only one puck had managed to make it over the glass to a young fan, finding the hands of a little girl held up by her father 15 feet to our left courtesy of Ryan Johansen. Blake seemed disappointed, but was ready to head back up to the seats anyway. I told him to wait for the crowd to disperse a bit and we could leave, but knowing that waiting would be our friend in pursuit of a puck.
After the players left the ice, a member of the Avs bench staff walked out to the goal to fish out several pucks that MacKinnon had just one-timed into the net to conclude his pre-game routine. As he turned around and started walking back toward the bench, he signaled to me and pointed to Blake and then to a puck.
Meeting us at the side of the bench, he slipped the puck around the glass for us, making everything that happened after that more palatable to handle for a little kid.
For that, a huge thank you to assistant athletic trainer Donovan Delarosbil for getting my guy a puck to commemorate his second Avs game.
As someone who used to be in a similar position on a much smaller scale working in college hockey, it was always a great feeling to make a kid’s night even with something as small a gesture as handing over a warm-up puck. Guys like Mr. Delarosbil get that. And Dads like me appreciate it. Instead of bringing home a despondent six year old, I drove home with a little boy sad his team lost, but happy his favorite player scored and, most importantly, with one happy memory of being handed that puck that will long outlive the final score.
So to you Avs fans here who get to take your kids to games regularly, enjoy it and cherish it. I only get the one chance a year to share my passion with my son and I do everything to make sure he has an unforgettable night regardless of the outcome.
He fell asleep 15 minutes outside of the city. When I looked back, his head was slumped over in his car seat with his Altitude hat pushed way up so his hair could fall across his forehead. And in the tight grip of his little sleeping fingers was the puck, a puck that has already found a place on his dresser so he can see it before he goes to sleep each night, waiting for a morning in which he will learn who won and who scored.
The outcome of the game wasn’t great, but it sure was a great night.
Go Avs Go!
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Sounds like an awesome time with your boy.
Very cool. Thanks for sharing.