"And this is the smile, that I've never shown before
Somebody shake me
Cause I, I must be sleeping"
Staind: "So Far Away"
As you may be able to tell if you've kept up with the story up until now, most of the major hockey moments in my life have happened in front of only a few thousand people, and pretty much all of them have involved the Blaze. However, we're going to step away from them now-in fact, they will play absolutely no part in this story beyond this point, except perhaps a brief background reference.
There have been some great moments in my hockey-watching life which haven't involved the Blaze or, in some cases, British teams-watching Evgeni Malkin playing live for Russia before he joined Pittsburgh, as the Russians warmed up for the Turin Olympics with a match against Germany at the Kolnarena while I was over there, supporting Germany and then taking part in an unofficial Germany-Russia street hockey game as (probably) the lone British import on the German side, through the concourses of Cologne-Deutz station, over a main road and back, streaming over the pedestrian footpath on the main Hohenzollern railway bridge (basically, the equivalent of a few players taking over Tower Bridge to shoot a puck or two) and out onto the banks of the Rhine, with the teams at about 300-a-side, anything from beer-cans to tennis balls being used as pucks and seeing a paralytically drunk Russian hurl himself full-length to stop a flying beer-can shot by one of his mates going through the window of a moving tram, for example (he stopped the shot and the traffic). Playing another game during the World Cup in Cologne main square which turned into a weird hybrid of football and hockey with a bunch of chanting Swedes, Poles, and Portugese was another one.
Or, closer to home, jamming home a loose puck from all of about six inches out in an empty Skydome to finally score a goal in a competitive game at my home rink-even though the place was empty, it was a rec game and only the players saw it, I still went ballistic in an outpouring of joy which included a weird "up on one leg, cocking a shotgun and firing" hybrid of a celebration (one I still use in the unlikely event of scoring) and had to be held up by a linemate as I nearly went over backwards.
All not bad nominees for "greatest moment", but surely my greatest hockey memory has to involve the Blaze, right?
Does it hell.
The greatest moment of my hockey life was this: Bill Lindsay scoring the overtime winner for Cologne against Dusseldorf in game 4 of the 2005/06 DEL playoff semi-finals.
A bit of background here: I'd moved to Germany at the beginning of that season, and Cologne were my nearest team. Being alone abroad, and having not really found that many friends at uni, the weekly train-journey from Aachen to Cologne, then the underground from Hauptbahnhof to Deutz, followed by the walk up the steps to purchase a ticket at the ticket window, became something of a ritual...it was bringing something of home with me, even if the colours and language were different. It helped that I made friends with a fair few Haie fans thanks to being able to speak fluent German, and given that I was becoming seriously disillusioned with British hockey (a process which just got worse when I came back, as you saw in part III), the Haie became more and more important to me.
I started watching games over there as a neutral, but got sucked in as the Haie (or Sharks, if you prefer English) began to band behind the killer instinct of Slovak sniper extraordinaire Ivan Ciernik, the blossoming young goalie Thomas Greiss (who is now in the San Jose Sharks system) and the crafty veterans Dave Mcllwain, Brad Schlegel and Alex Hicks (to the point where, when they came over to Coventry to play the Blaze as part of the Ahearne Cup, I supported the Sharks for that game just because it felt right due to various issues I had with the Blaze's treatment of me over certain things) and then came my first KEC-DEG game.
DEG are Dusseldorf Metro Stars, and anyone who's been anywhere near Germany knows that the rivalry between the two great Rheinland cities of Cologne and Dusseldorf, standing half-an-hour's journey from each other on the banks of the Rhein, is possibly one of the fiercest city-to-city battles in Europe. Think Manchester and Liverpool, only tripled...Dusseldorf is the capital of the state of Rheinland-Westfalen, while Cologne is the economic powerhouse and one of the culture capitals of Germany-it's the beautiful classical maiden to Dusseldorf's rugby-playing powerhouse of a modern businessman. Hatred of the other city isn't learned in the inhabitants of these two towns-it's fed to babies with their mother's milk. The Haie-Metrostars games are known as the "Rheinderby" and if you think the hype over each Sheffield-Nottingham game is bad, then look away-these games are bloodless wars on and off the ice-you get the sense that, as long as these games are won, any poor season can be forgiven.
It was the most unbelievable atmosphere I've ever experienced...words simply can't do it justice. Imagine the atmosphere at the EIHL Playoff Finals just before the first game, then multiply it by 17,000, and you've got the Koelnarena on derby day.
Now imagine that in playoff time (German playoff series are "best-of-five"), with the Haie 2-1 down and having to win to keep their season alive, and 17,000 people, including a thousand or so from just up the Rhein, holding their breath as the puck drops and hoping for the result to go their way.
What followed was 70 minutes of the greatest hockey I've ever seen. Bar none.
Cologne scored first through Alex Hicks, who had already announced his retirement at the end of the season.-every shift could now be his last, and boy, could you tell by the way he leapt high into the air in celebration as the puck hit the net. The first period ended 1-0 Cologne, before the momentum went back the other way as DEG pressure told, Chris Ferraro scored and the game was once again balanced on a knife edge. A blast from Stephane Julien moments later restored the home advantage, before the script went badly, badly wrong.
First, Hicks earned himself a game misconduct for a viciously hard hit on DEG's Alex Sulzer, which was not noticeably harder than any of the others flying in (every collision was a board-rattler that night), but was judged to be from behind-and so from now on, the continuation of his career rested on his team-mates. And they seemed to wilt under the pressure-Klaus Kathan and Andy Schneider, both German internationals, scoring in quick succesion with a bullet wrister and a rebound respectively to leave the Haie 20 minutes from elimination.
The third period was horrifically tense. First, elation as Eduard Lewandowski tipped in a Mcllwain pass to equalise. Then, despair as DEG were awarded a penalty shot thanks to a Metrostar being hauled down on a breakaway-the silence when Craig Johnson scored was bottomless-the celebrating DEG fans one tier above my place in the terracing behind the goal he scored it sounded like the laughter of ghosts in a deserted mansion.
The clock ticked, with the roaring of the Haie crowd ceaseless, like the thundering of a hurricane-tossed sea, but becoming tinted with more and more desperation...the clock ticked past 59 minutes, and people were praying in the stands...
Then, the puck went into the DEG zone yet again as the waves of red charged forward one last time, bounced, found the stick of Brad Schlegel, and was propelled like a rocket into Trefilov's pads-it came out and the hopes of a city sat on the stick of Bill Lindsay as he found himself with an inch of space and got to the puck just as goalie Andrei Trefilov dived...and poked it home.
Bedlam. Utter, total, complete bedlam. The ghosts across the river in the cathedral must have stirred in their sleep at the roar of complete, mindless joy which nearly lifted the roof off the Koelnarena. We were going to overtime...
A season resting on every pass, every shot, every check. You don't know the tension until you've lived it, and I did that night...when Lewandowski broke away, the air seemed to be sucked out of the rink as the crowd held their breath, only to be expelled in a primal roar of anger as he, too was pulled down from behind.
Oh. My. God. Penalty shot. In overtime. For Cologne.
The greatest moment of my hockey life was this: Bill Lindsay scoring the overtime winner for Cologne against Dusseldorf in game 4 of the 2005/06 DEL playoff semi-finals.
A bit of background here: I'd moved to Germany at the beginning of that season, and Cologne were my nearest team. Being alone abroad, and having not really found that many friends at uni, the weekly train-journey from Aachen to Cologne, then the underground from Hauptbahnhof to Deutz, followed by the walk up the steps to purchase a ticket at the ticket window, became something of a ritual...it was bringing something of home with me, even if the colours and language were different. It helped that I made friends with a fair few Haie fans thanks to being able to speak fluent German, and given that I was becoming seriously disillusioned with British hockey (a process which just got worse when I came back, as you saw in part III), the Haie became more and more important to me.
I started watching games over there as a neutral, but got sucked in as the Haie (or Sharks, if you prefer English) began to band behind the killer instinct of Slovak sniper extraordinaire Ivan Ciernik, the blossoming young goalie Thomas Greiss (who is now in the San Jose Sharks system) and the crafty veterans Dave Mcllwain, Brad Schlegel and Alex Hicks (to the point where, when they came over to Coventry to play the Blaze as part of the Ahearne Cup, I supported the Sharks for that game just because it felt right due to various issues I had with the Blaze's treatment of me over certain things) and then came my first KEC-DEG game.
DEG are Dusseldorf Metro Stars, and anyone who's been anywhere near Germany knows that the rivalry between the two great Rheinland cities of Cologne and Dusseldorf, standing half-an-hour's journey from each other on the banks of the Rhein, is possibly one of the fiercest city-to-city battles in Europe. Think Manchester and Liverpool, only tripled...Dusseldorf is the capital of the state of Rheinland-Westfalen, while Cologne is the economic powerhouse and one of the culture capitals of Germany-it's the beautiful classical maiden to Dusseldorf's rugby-playing powerhouse of a modern businessman. Hatred of the other city isn't learned in the inhabitants of these two towns-it's fed to babies with their mother's milk. The Haie-Metrostars games are known as the "Rheinderby" and if you think the hype over each Sheffield-Nottingham game is bad, then look away-these games are bloodless wars on and off the ice-you get the sense that, as long as these games are won, any poor season can be forgiven.
It was the most unbelievable atmosphere I've ever experienced...words simply can't do it justice. Imagine the atmosphere at the EIHL Playoff Finals just before the first game, then multiply it by 17,000, and you've got the Koelnarena on derby day.
Now imagine that in playoff time (German playoff series are "best-of-five"), with the Haie 2-1 down and having to win to keep their season alive, and 17,000 people, including a thousand or so from just up the Rhein, holding their breath as the puck drops and hoping for the result to go their way.
What followed was 70 minutes of the greatest hockey I've ever seen. Bar none.
Cologne scored first through Alex Hicks, who had already announced his retirement at the end of the season.-every shift could now be his last, and boy, could you tell by the way he leapt high into the air in celebration as the puck hit the net. The first period ended 1-0 Cologne, before the momentum went back the other way as DEG pressure told, Chris Ferraro scored and the game was once again balanced on a knife edge. A blast from Stephane Julien moments later restored the home advantage, before the script went badly, badly wrong.
First, Hicks earned himself a game misconduct for a viciously hard hit on DEG's Alex Sulzer, which was not noticeably harder than any of the others flying in (every collision was a board-rattler that night), but was judged to be from behind-and so from now on, the continuation of his career rested on his team-mates. And they seemed to wilt under the pressure-Klaus Kathan and Andy Schneider, both German internationals, scoring in quick succesion with a bullet wrister and a rebound respectively to leave the Haie 20 minutes from elimination.
The third period was horrifically tense. First, elation as Eduard Lewandowski tipped in a Mcllwain pass to equalise. Then, despair as DEG were awarded a penalty shot thanks to a Metrostar being hauled down on a breakaway-the silence when Craig Johnson scored was bottomless-the celebrating DEG fans one tier above my place in the terracing behind the goal he scored it sounded like the laughter of ghosts in a deserted mansion.
The clock ticked, with the roaring of the Haie crowd ceaseless, like the thundering of a hurricane-tossed sea, but becoming tinted with more and more desperation...the clock ticked past 59 minutes, and people were praying in the stands...
Then, the puck went into the DEG zone yet again as the waves of red charged forward one last time, bounced, found the stick of Brad Schlegel, and was propelled like a rocket into Trefilov's pads-it came out and the hopes of a city sat on the stick of Bill Lindsay as he found himself with an inch of space and got to the puck just as goalie Andrei Trefilov dived...and poked it home.
Bedlam. Utter, total, complete bedlam. The ghosts across the river in the cathedral must have stirred in their sleep at the roar of complete, mindless joy which nearly lifted the roof off the Koelnarena. We were going to overtime...
A season resting on every pass, every shot, every check. You don't know the tension until you've lived it, and I did that night...when Lewandowski broke away, the air seemed to be sucked out of the rink as the crowd held their breath, only to be expelled in a primal roar of anger as he, too was pulled down from behind.
Oh. My. God. Penalty shot. In overtime. For Cologne.
Jan Alinc was the man chosen to take it. And, unbelievably, he fanned on the shot. This game had more twists and turns than the Stelvio Pass...
Back and forth the game went, before it ended in a single, glorious second right in front of me, when this happened. I was stood at ice-level, right behind where Mike Pellegrins loses the puck, and as Lindsay scored I thought the roof had come off the Koelnarena, as I joined in with and was lost without trace in a hurricane of noise which the tape simply doesn't do justice to. Sometimes, in quiet moments, I can replay the whole scene in my mind as it unfolded in front of me. And I am certain that, this time, the ghosts in the cathedral woke up and roared with us.
Unfortunately, time has dulled my ability to summon back anything close to the emotion of how I felt at that precise moment, but it's not an exaggeration to say that (and I remember the words I used even if I can't remember the feeling itself) I felt like I was lifted up on the shoulders of the hockey gods. Nothing before or since has come close to the extremes of emotion I felt in that game. Nothing. And I don't think anything in hockey ever will.
And, in some ways, that's sad. But I look at it this way as I travel to every Blaze game with part of me in a ceaseless hoping to get a feeling close to it, and respond the same way to those who say "once you've felt something like that, everything else is a disappointment"...even if you shoot for the moon and miss, you'll land among the stars..."
So keep searching...and one day, it might be your turn for a piggyback on the shoulders of the Gods...in the meantime, I'll keep looking, hoping to get my chance at another ride, however brief. Although this time, I hope it's my home-town team that gets me there...
Keep keeping your eye on the puck...Round the Rinks to come later...
