Crosstown Traffic

Our Leafs correspondent, Andrew, swings both ways. No, not that way!  His team loyalities are divided between Toronto and Vancouver. Previously, he shared his travel diary of a visit to Ottawa to see the Sens lose to the Canucks, and now he details his trip across town to see the Leafs face the Orcas. Of course, hilarity and hijinx ensues.

We didn't recognize you with your clothes on, Ryan!

“On Monday I went to work and a coworker said she was getting tickets off Kijiji (a free classifieds site in Canada). $500 for a pair of 12th row behind the benches at centre ice tickets. Didn’t need to ask me twice. I told her as soon as she had the tickets, I would give her the money and all would be splendid. Except.

Buddy kept giving her the run around. Telling her tickets needed to be emailed by MLSE. Or that he sent them already and she must have deleted them. Needless to say, the week dragged on and this guy kept flaking out. Friday came around and the guy basically said “I’m keeping your money and you can sue me, you liar.” So there it was. Friday, day before game day, friend out $500 and us not having tickets.

But folks, angels exist. Big, beautiful angels. As I had resigned myself by Friday night to not going to the game, I get a Facebook message from a former coworker. She asks if I’m still in desire of two Canucks tickets. I say yes. She tells me how her wife got them as a tip for a job, tried to sell them, go screwed over by the buyer and now just wanted to get what she could for them. I promptly lose my shit. And, after an exchange of SIGNIFICANTLY less money, my friend and I had the tickets in our hands. There is good still left in this world. Needless to say, it was a minor miracle how all this fell apart and rebuilt itself within 24 hours.

My friend and I (it was also her birthday on the Saturday, so it was double special) were at odds, because we’re both Canucks and Leafs fans. We wanted to rep both teams so we flipped a coin to see who would wear what jersey. I got the Canucks again, she wore her McCabe jersey.

We head down to the game and are met at the gate by very attractive fellow Leafs/Canucks fans with a sexiful Quebec accent. We all get to talking and high fiving and being rabble rousers. It was great. Then the doors open, we go to our seats, drop off our shit and head down to the glass for warmup again. We’re on the Canucks side again, so I get double duty on Canucks pics. Which, hey, I can’t deny was awesome (on the most vain of levels, they are a far more attractive team than the Leafs).

It marked an important game for on Canuck in particular. For Cody Hodgson, it was his first game in his hometown. So he came out a little early to take it all in.

Cody Hodgson: Adorbs!

I didn’t quite make it to the glass for warmup, so I was perched a little higher. But, in actuality, this allowed me some very, VERY nice pics. See here: Warmup love (and guess who I fancy):

Higgins was whistling and dancing along to the Rihanna playing over the PA. Fucking cute as hell.

The only shot I could zoom in of Lupul. It made me sad. But that position... looks familiar

And the following is a shot I will forever be kicking my own ass over. Notice his jersey slightly askew? I was about 1.5 seconds shy of getting an abs shot. I got to see it with my own eyes, though. So fuck. But I’m so pissed. I’ll just have to go to another one to get it.

We watch them go off and get into our seats. It was going to be a good game. Either side winning was good by us, we had GREAT seats. Oh, but before we went back, I went into the concourse one more time. And guess who was there? Miss Sloppy Seconds herself.

All things above predicated what was an amazing game. I was cheering non-stop, Leafs would score, Canucks would score, it was a wonderful night of hockey. It’s an amazing thing seeing your two favourite teams lock horns and just go for it. Vancouver bested the Leafs in the end, but it didn’t matter. It was an evening of pure and utter contentment. Seeing good hockey, in a great city, with my top two teams. How can you beat that? And hell, I even got to talk about my new phone to a hot guy on the bus ride back home. Batting a thousand, for real. And now, more splendid pics:

Taken a split second before the puck went in off the deflection.

Ohai, Ryan!Henrik?

It was a great week of hockey. There’s very little that can top the atmosphere inside an NHL arena on game day. It’s electric. It’s magical. In a word? It’s unicorns. And I’ve got three more unicorns on the horizon. Life is good.”

Life is good, Andrew is better. Following him on twitter is best:  @manbearpiglpu

This entry was posted in Toronto Maple Leafs, Vancouver Canucks. Bookmark the permalink.

One Response to Crosstown Traffic

  1. needs more Alexander Sulzer (did I complain about that in the last post? I don’t remember)!!!!!!

    but, awesome pictures Andrew <3

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Google+ photo

You are commenting using your Google+ account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s