I Have So Many Nice Things To Say About The Avalanche And The Wild

DENVER — The Colorado Avalanche's home building, 26-year-old Puck Arena, is a blandly serviceable midpoint between the old-school kookiness of Calgary's Saddledome and the blinding shininess of Edmonton's Rogers Place. But it's what's on the inside that counts, and credit where it's due: Neither of the two Canadian rinks that I visited on this mountain-time hockey trip came close to the atmosphere at the Avs' shootout win over the Wild on Sunday afternoon.

You might say it's easier for a weekend matinee to supply a team with a packed house, because it's an ideal time for a lot of families to go to their one hockey game a year. But the start time doesn't inherently guarantee close attention, and that was a huge part of what made this early-bird game memorable. This was a turbocharged crowd that locked in for the final regular season match-up between two great division rivals from the moment the puck dropped. The fans welcomed back trade-deadline reacquisition Nazem Kadri, of the '22 Cup team, like he was Peter Forsberg, and they went nuts just for a backchecking dispossession he pulled off early in the game. They gassed up goaltender Scott Wedgewood with "Wedgie" chants during his first-star-worthy performance, answering a question I had about whether he went by "Wedgie" or "Woody." They made especially loud "Oh!"s on missed attempts that hit my ears like an express train wooshing through a local station. They got exasperated with the zebras who displayed an abundance of caution on faceoffs. They kept the aisles remarkably clear as the vast majority took intermission as their only cue that it was safe to do business on the concourse. And when the Avs found the back of the net, everyone—not "a lot of people," but everyone—rose to their feet, like it was some deeper evolutionary response to seeing a goal.

I hesitate to call this a playoff-game feel, because there's an undercurrent of fear to the cheering when there's so much on the line. These were just thousands of people who were so excited to see the Avalanche play hockey. And why wouldn't they be? The Avs may be coming off a heartbreaking first-round loss to the Stars in last year's postseason, but they've played this year at a level that no other NHL team's been able to match. They're tops in the league at both scoring goals and preventing them. They've got the game's leading scorer in Nathan MacKinnon and the reigning Norris winner in Cale Makar. They're getting a randomly fantastic season out of the journeyman Wedgewood. The depth guys are doing their jobs. And relative newcomers to the club Brock Nelson and Marty Nečas are paying off at a level beyond what anyone reasonably expected. Watching live, it's instantly recognizable how fast this team is, how much chemistry they have, and how much trouble the defense has keeping up. Even on Colorado's chances that don't work out, you can often see what they were thinking and appreciate the beauty they would have achieved if they'd just crossed the goal line, like looking at a sketch from a master painter.