Back when I was a youngster, you couldn't watch a lot of sports on TV. Sure, the NFL had a few games on every week, and the local Fox affiliate had some Cubs games, but mostly, if you wanted to hear what was going on in a sports event as it happened, you needed a radio. Tonight, I listened to the Fort Wayne Komets win the ECHL championship for the first time since they upgraded to the league.
Fort Wayne has always been a huge hockey town. Other than the Original Six and the Hershey Bears, no other team has played in the same city with the same name as long as the Komets. We've had other teams come and go. The Tin Caps are a pretty successful baseball team right now. But no one has had the success or the rabid fan base as the Komets. And they capped off decades of success with another championship tonight, which I got to listen to (not the whole game, because I lost track of time, but I got to hear the glorious third period) on the local AM station.
Honestly, it was pretty cool listening on the AM feed. Reminded me of what it was like to listen to the Cubs on the same station years ago, or of spending Sunday mornings with my dad trying to pick up KFAN on the old radio to listen to the Vikings. In the age of HD TV, we forget that it was possible to enjoy sports with just some guy telling you over the airwaves what was happening. We even had a countdown tonight ("thirty seconds to go...twenty seconds to go...!") until a late icing forced a final faceoff with 1.9 left on the clock. It went nowhere, and the Komets were champs.
One of the head ushers at the Coliseum is someone I know from high school who is locally famous and was on the news for how she dances in the aisles during every Komets game. I imagine she was dancing her ass off tonight.
Anyway, I really only shared this because it reminded me of how cool it was to experience sports the old-fashioned way, before ESPN and BTN and all that. Cheers.
Fort Wayne has always been a huge hockey town. Other than the Original Six and the Hershey Bears, no other team has played in the same city with the same name as long as the Komets. We've had other teams come and go. The Tin Caps are a pretty successful baseball team right now. But no one has had the success or the rabid fan base as the Komets. And they capped off decades of success with another championship tonight, which I got to listen to (not the whole game, because I lost track of time, but I got to hear the glorious third period) on the local AM station.
Honestly, it was pretty cool listening on the AM feed. Reminded me of what it was like to listen to the Cubs on the same station years ago, or of spending Sunday mornings with my dad trying to pick up KFAN on the old radio to listen to the Vikings. In the age of HD TV, we forget that it was possible to enjoy sports with just some guy telling you over the airwaves what was happening. We even had a countdown tonight ("thirty seconds to go...twenty seconds to go...!") until a late icing forced a final faceoff with 1.9 left on the clock. It went nowhere, and the Komets were champs.
One of the head ushers at the Coliseum is someone I know from high school who is locally famous and was on the news for how she dances in the aisles during every Komets game. I imagine she was dancing her ass off tonight.
Anyway, I really only shared this because it reminded me of how cool it was to experience sports the old-fashioned way, before ESPN and BTN and all that. Cheers.