San Jose Sharks Game

The Sharks' only goal of the night.

I rarely attend sporting events (although that may change now that I live two blocks from AT&T Park), so the spontaneous opportunity to attend a San Jose Sharks game last night was an appealing change of pace.

There’s nothing quite like the experience of a major league sporting event. Sure, the food and beer is expensive and awful (awfully expensive?), but that’s the price you pay to be in an arena, “The Tank,” in this case, with thousands of other people, many of them die-hard fans.

The energy in the place is infectious: the collective oohs and aahs, boos and gasps, and screams of delight and anger as two teams battle on ice to put a tiny rubber puck in an enormous (by comparison, anyway) net.

How these players are able to just simply fly across the ice is nothing short of amazing to me. Of course, my ice skating experience consists of maybe two hours at an ice rink trying not to break anything on myself or others as I careened nearly out of control to the sound of 80s music. Okay, maybe it wasn’t truly that bad, but it seemed that way at the time.

Anyway, unfortunately for me, the Sharks weren’t having too hot a night: they scored a single goal early in the game, but the momentum didn’t last and they succumbed to the Dallas Stars (Dallas has a hockey team? Really?) 4-1.