Jeff Petry of the Montreal Canadiens and Zach Hyman of the Toronto Maple Leafs fight for position in the second period during an exhibition game prior to the 2020 NHL Stanley Cup Playoffs at Scotiabank Arena on July 28, 2020 in Toronto.
ANDRE RINGUETTE/Getty Images
Here’s the usual timeline of attending a hockey game for a sportswriter.
You get there three or four hours early. You drop off your laptop in the pressbox. You wander around the backstage looking for someone to talk to. You have the press meal. You wander some more.
You go back up to the gondola and online shop for a while. The arena starts to fill with people. You curse the volume of the music, as well as the music.
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You rearrange your stuff because the two people alongside you are nearly in your lap. You shed a layer or two because it’s warming up. Then the anthems, hockey, Stompin’ Tom, beers, cheers and all the other things we associate with old-timey Canadiana.
Here’s the COVID-19 timeline of attending the first competitive NHL hockey played in Toronto in 140 days.
You get there an hour before because they have to clear out the written media from the game before. All six of them.
That’s good because you needed that time at home to think about your wardrobe. Pants or sweatpants? Pants or sweatpants? You decide that you still have your pride and wear pants. A decision you will regret for the next several hours.
Also, you haven’t gone to work at night in a long time. You are feeling an odd, generalized anxiety – like first-day-of-school jitters. Whenever this pandemic ends, you will have to be driven from your home, rather than freed from it.
You get to the Scotiabank Arena. Most of it is fenced off and dark. It takes you 20 minutes to figure out how to get into a building you’ve entered hundreds of times.
Next, the health-check rigmarole. A paramedic points a laser thermometer at you.
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“You can’t possibly be this cold,” he says.
How cold?
“If you were this cold, you’d be hypothermic.”
Then he points the thermometer at himself and says, “Well. I’m fine.”
Great.
As usual, you enter an empty arena. All empty sports venues are vaguely unsettling, but this is different. They’ve tarped off the seats around the skating surface and erected projection display boards. It’s brighter. This feels like a backstage before curtain rise.
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The arena is cold. Compared to outside, it is arctic. You begin adding layers.
You take your distanced seat up in the nosebleeds. They have been nice enough to supply you with NHL-branded anti-bacterial wipes.
Just in case you don’t want to use the wipes, there is an arena employee standing just a ways off holding some. He’s eyeing you. Maybe you know him? Hard to say with the mask. He keeps staring. Once you move off, he rushes in after you to sanitize everything you’ve just touched. A seat back. The railing. A concrete buttress.
You go out to get a bottle of water. One of the kiosks has been opened just for the dozen of you.
“That’ll be $3.50.”
Um, I’m just gonna go back and get my wallet (which is in your back pocket).
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You retake your seat and make a note to start bringing your own water. So that you can sell it to other writers for three bucks.
Without any preamble, the Toronto Maple Leafs and Montreal Canadiens appear on the ice. They do it together because, you know, what’s the point?
There is still a portentous PA announcement in English and French. During warm-ups, it is possible there are more players on the ice than there are people in the audience watching them.
You know what’s the same? The music. The wretched music. Bad pop songs remixed so that they are even worse, played at ear-shattering volume. When I end up in hell, ‘Greatest Hits from a Generic NHL Arena’ will be the soundtrack.
The teams leave the ice and the music continues. It is broken occasionally by the sound of the Zamboni crew yelling at each other. You’ve never heard that before.
When the teams return for the anthems, there is a “moment of reflection” for Eddie Shack. This is the most silent moment of silence you have ever heard, and you’ve been there for a few. When the canned announcement ends it with, “Thank you,” the quality of silence that follows is identical.
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Then there is hockey.
Even up in the second level, you can hear the players yelling at each other. This is a feature of practices, but the screaming is now more urgent, if not terribly profane. That’s a disappointment.
NHL hockey without the benefit of a screaming audience appears slower, though it can’t be.
When you think about it, a crowd is what separates elite professional sports from every other decent sort. Second-best pros are ‘nearly’ everything – nearly as fast, nearly as good. The size of the crowd is the first thing that alerts you to the difference.
If you saw the Vancouver Canucks out of uniform playing in a community rink, you’d think, ‘Wow, those guys must be in some amazing beer league.’ Without the crowd, you can’t be sure. Without the crowd, a huge amount of the magic is drained away.
Because whatever the vibe is supposed to be in an NHL arena, there is none here. Zero. After all this time off, even the players look underwhelmed.
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But for now, the lack of an audience is a clear advantage for the Maple Leafs. This team has been playing without the distraction of crowd noise for decades now.
Thirty-three seconds after puck drop, the Leafs score. A lovely John Tavares-to-Ilya Mikheyev two-on-one.
Had this been any other sort of start in any other time – or, Lordy Lordy, the playoffs – you can imagine what this place would have sounded like. Rattling. The sort of noise that makes you think about structural engineering and its effectiveness.
Instead, you hear a few chirps from the ice and then the music kicks up again.
GUADALAJARA, Mexico – Canada’s Marina Stakusic fell 6-4, 6-3 to Poland’s Magdalena Frech in the quarterfinals of the Guadalajara Open tennis tournament on Friday.
The 19-year-old from Mississauga, Ont., won 61 per cent of her first-serve points and broke on just one of her six opportunities.
Stakusic had upset top-seeded Jelena Ostapenko of Latvia 6-3, 5-7, 7-6 (0) on Thursday night to advance.
In the opening round, Stakusic defeated Slovakia’s Anna Karolína Schmiedlová 6-2, 6-4 on Tuesday.
The fifth-seeded Frech won 62 per cent of her first-serve points and converted on three of her nine break point opportunities.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 13, 2024.
TORONTO – Alejandro Kirk’s long single with the bases loaded provided the Toronto Blue Jays with a walk-off 4-3 win in the 11th inning of their series opener against the St. Louis Cardinals on Friday.
With the Cardinals outfield in, Kirk drove a shot off the base of the left-field wall to give the Blue Jays (70-78) their fourth win in 11 outings and halt the Cardinals’ (74-73) two-game win streak before 30,380 at Rogers Centre.
Kirk enjoyed a two-hit, two-RBI outing.
Erik Swanson (2-2) pitched a perfect 11th inning for the win, while Cardinals reliever Ryan Fernandez (1-5) took the loss.
Blue Jays starter Kevin Gausman enjoyed a seven-inning, 104-pitch outing. He surrendered his two runs on nine hits and two walks and fanned only two Cardinals.
He gave way to reliever Genesis Cabrera, who gave up a one-out homer to Thomas Saggese, his first in 2024, that tied the game in the eighth.
The Cardinals started swiftly with four straight singles to open the game. But they exited the first inning with only two runs on an RBI single to centre from Nolan Arendao and a fielder’s choice from Saggese.
Gausman required 28 pitches to escape the first inning but settled down to allow his teammates to snatch the lead in the fourth.
He also deftly pitched out of threats from the visitors in the fifth, sixth and seventh thanks to some solid defence, including Will Wagner’s diving stop, which led to a double play to end the fifth inning.
George Springer led off with a walk and stole second base. He advanced to third on Nathan Lukes’s single and scored when Vladimir Guerrero Jr. knocked in his 95th run with a double off the left-field wall.
Lukes scored on a sacrifice fly to left field from Spencer Horwitz. Guerrero touched home on Kirk’s two-out single to right.
In the ninth, Guerrero made a critical diving catch on an Arenado grounder to throw out the Cardinals’ infielder, with reliever Tommy Nance covering first. The defensive gem ended the inning with a runner on second base.
St. Louis starter Erick Fedde faced the minimum night batters in the first three innings thanks to a pair of double plays. He lasted five innings, giving up three runs on six hits and a walk with three strikeouts.
ON DECK
Toronto ace Jose Berrios (15-9) will start the second of the three-game series on Saturday. He has a six-game win streak.
The Cardinals will counter with righty Kyle Gibson (8-6).
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 13, 2024.
CALGARY – Mired in their first four-game losing skid in 20 years, the Calgary Stampeders are going back to Jake Maier at quarterback on Saturday after he was benched for a game.
It won’t be an easy assignment.
Visiting McMahon Stadium are the Eastern Conference-leading Montreal Alouettes (10-2) who own the CFL’s best record. The Stampeders (4-8) have fallen to last in the Western Conference.
“Six games is plenty of time, but also it is just six games,” said Maier. “We’ve got to be able to get on the right track.”
Calgary is in danger of missing the playoffs for the first time since 2004.
“I do still believe in this team,” said Stampeders’ head coach and general manager Dave Dickenson. “I want to see improvement, though. I want to see guys on a weekly basis elevating their game, and we haven’t been doing that.”
Maier is one of the guys under the microscope. Two weeks ago, the second-year starter threw four interceptions in a 35-20 home loss to the Edmonton Elks.
After his replacement, rookie Logan Bonner, threw five picks in last week’s 37-16 loss to the Elks in Edmonton, the football is back in Maier’s hands.
“Any time you fail or something doesn’t go your way in life, does it stink in the moment? Yeah. But then the days go on and you learn things about yourself and you learn how to prepare a little bit better,” said Maier. “It makes you mentally tougher.”
Dickenson wants to see his quarterback making better decisions with the football.
“Things are going to happen, interceptions will happen, but try to take calculated risks, rather than just putting the ball up there and hoping that we catch it,” said Dickenson.
A former quarterback himself, he knows the importance of that vital position.
“You cannot win without good quarterback play,” Dickenson said. “You’ve got to be able to make some plays — off-schedule plays, move-around plays, plays that break down, plays that aren’t designed perfectly, but somehow you found the right guy, and then those big throws where you’re taking that hit.”
But it’s going to take a team effort, and that includes the club’s receiving corp.
“We always have to band together because we need everything to go right for our receivers to get the ball,” said Nik Lewis, the Stampeders’ receivers coach. “The running back has to pick up the blitz, the o-line has to block, the quarterback has to make the right reads, and then give us a catchable ball.”
Lewis brings a unique perspective to this season’s frustrations as he was a 22-year-old rookie in Calgary in 2004 when the Stamps went 4-14 under coach Matt Dunigan. They turned it around the next season and haven’t missed the playoffs since.”
“Thinking back and just looking at it, there’s just got to be an ultimate belief that you can get it done. Look at Montreal, they were 6-7 last year and they’ve gone 18-2 since then,” said Lewis.
Montreal is also looking to rebound from a 37-23 loss to the B.C. Lions last week. But for head coach Jason Maas, he says his team’s mindset doesn’t change, regardless of what happened the previous week.
“Last year when we went through a four-game losing streak, you couldn’t tell if we were on a four-game winning streak or a four-game losing streak by the way the guys were in the building, the way we prepared, the type of work ethic we have,” said Maas. “All our standards are set, so that’s all we focus on.”
While they may have already clinched a playoff spot, Alouettes’ quarterback Cody Fajardo says this closing stretch remains critical because they want to finish the season strong, just like last year when they won their final five regular-season games before ultimately winning the Grey Cup.
“It doesn’t matter about what you do at the beginning of the year,” said Fajardo. “All that matters is how you end the year and how well you’re playing going into the playoffs so that’s what these games are about.”
The Alouettes’ are kicking off a three-game road stretch, one Fajardo looks forward to.
“You understand what kind of team you have when you play on the road because it’s us versus the world mentality and you can feel everybody against you,” said Fajardo. “Plus, I always tend to find more joy in silencing thousands of people than bringing thousands of people to their feet.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 13, 2024.
