Monday, July 9, 2007

01-07-07: penguins vs. tampa bay lightning

i used to work for eat'n park; my husband still does. eat'n park rents a luxury box at the mellon arena year-round. as a manager, my husband is entitled to request tickets to an event of his choice once a year. we always ask for penguins tickets. i know we are very lucky because it's fucking great. we've seen sooooo many players up there: robert lang touched my shoulders, my old boss shared an elevator with lemieux, dan potash told my husband he liked his st. patty's wilkes-barre/scranton jersey, and we saw joey mullen in the hallway (just to name a few)!!!

in fact, the eat'n park box was only 2 down from lemieux's old luxury box. we used to take his picture every time we were in the box, but one year he wasn't there. we were curious about it, so i asked one of the ushers when he came in to restock the beer and snacks. he told us that lemieux sold his box and was using the private suite upstairs, but lemieux's wife nathalie wasn't happy about it. she liked interacting with the fans and having parties in their old box. apparently, she was pretty pissed about it, so she and the kids got tickets for the general admission area!

anyways, this year we got tickets to see the pens play the lightning on january 7. even though the pens ultimately lost the game, it was the first time i got to see a shootout in person (awesome!), and it was the game where sidney scored the goal on his stomach. i don't know why, but i could tell something incredible was about to happen, so i used my digital camera's video recorder to catch the action. it has no sound, it's really far away because i was in the box, and it's kind of shaky because i was cheering, but it doesn't matter because i captured this:



and here are some still pictures i took:



just before game time




the singing of the national anthem (bing is on the far right in the line of players)



faceoff!



the view from the luxury box


here are some pictures i got from the internet:



pre-game save the pens rally (oh, those were dark days)



the penguins' website shot of the goal



awesome 2-part shot of the goal



1 comment:

rachel said...

Great story and very nice pics!