A Wild State: Detroit may be Hockeytown, but the State of Hockey is Minnesota
MN high school hockey sweaters in St.Paul's Xcel Energy Center
This is amazing, but it's different than high school because there you win with the guys you've known since you were little and who you've played with all your life. Still, winning this national title is an incredible feeling, and it's almost as good as making it to state.
- University of Minnesota forward Gino Guyer
People in Texas may be able to understand this, given their devotion to high school football. Outside of that, Minnesota's devotion to high school hockey is a phenomenon that truly cannot be explained. To fully understand the depth of the devotion felt by Minnesotans toward the high school version of their national sport, you almost have to have grown up and absorbed that culture. In wintertime, there are two things Minnesotans are guaranteed to have an opinion on: ice fishing and high school hockey.
Until the Minnesota Wild brought the NHL back to town and moved into the gleaming Xcel Energy Center, the long-time record for largest attendance at a hockey game in the state was set at a high school game -- namely Minnesota's legendary state high school hockey tournament....
Walk into Frank's Bar on Main Avenue in Warroad (which boasts three Olympic hockey gold-medal winners among its 1,500 residents), and owner Frank Krahn can tell you, in detail, about the 1969 state championship game. Krahn was a member of Warroad's team, which lost 5-4 in overtime to wealthy suburb Edina before more than 15,000 at Met Center. Ask around the bar, and someone's sure to know whether it was the post or the crossbar that Jim Fish hit in the second overtime of the 1988 rematch between Warroad and Edina, this time in the state semifinals before a sold-out crowd at the St. Paul Civic Center. (For the record, it was the crossbar, and Edina went on to win that one too.)
In a region where the thermometer routinely fails to register a temp above zero for a month or more at a time, the arena lobby is the social gathering place for the community, where adults sip coffee to warm up between periods. It has been said that many Minnesota clergymen keep their sermons short because so many adults see life in terms of 15-minute periods with a 10-minute break for resurfacing in between.
Let's face it, Minnesotans are a different breed. While most "normal" people can't imagine wintering in a place where you can drive automobiles across a lake (yes, Virginia, it IS possible to walk on water....), most Minnesotans embrace the frigid cold. I used to work in an office builing that faced Lake Calhoun in south Minneapolis. Once the lake froze over, there was one man who would walk out onto the lake every afternoon, cut a whole in the ice, and spend the afternoon fishing while sitting on an overturned five-gallon plastic pickle bucket. WE LOVE IT!!
Minnesotans are also rather provincial when it comes to hockey. Canada's game? Like hell....
If there's one complaint the locals have about the Wild, it's that since Richfield native Darby Hendrickson was sent to the minors a month or so ago, there are no Minnesotans on the team's roster. There is more than one quite provincial hockey fan among the state's five million residents. And it's not that they don't like Marian Gaborik or Andrew Brunette, it just that they think that line would click much better with the likes of Jamie Langenbrunner (from Cloquet), Mark Parrish (from Bloomington), Trent Klatt (from Osseo) or Jason Blake (from Moorhead) on the wing.
Much like the proud father of the bride in "My Big Fat Greek Wedding," who claimed that Greek was the root of every word in the English language, some Minnesotans like to trace nearly everything hockey related to roots somewhere within their home state. They shrugged off last spring's playoff loss to Anaheim by pointing out that the Mighty Ducks started as a mythical Minneapolis peewee team in the original Disney movie, which was filmed at hockey rinks and various other sites throughout the Twin Cities.
The 1980 US Olympic "Miracle on Ice" team? Yep, there were a dozen Minnesotans on it's roster. The coach, Herb Brooks, was also a Minnesota native. Yes, many Minnesotans on some level claim the 1980 victory over the Soviet Union as their own. Speaking it for myself, I can remember it as if it were yesterday, especially since I was still living in Minnesota at that time.
Of course, what else are you going to think of when your sitting on a pickle bucket in the middle of a frozen lake?
