champs in our eyes

champs in our eyes

I just got back from Olympic Plaza in downtown Calgary, from the rally to honour the Calgary Flames on their incredible, storybook playoff run. My impressions can be summed up in one word:

wow

Calgary Police (well, at least the two on horseback that I talked to afterwards) estimated the crowd at 30 thousand people. That's 30000 people (about 3% of the population of the city) attending a rally for a team that lost the finals. Of those 30000, maybe ten thousand were close enough to see anything; all the rest saw only the backs of the people in front of them.

Organizers started the rally at noon, but the players didn't arrive until 1pm. Each player on the team was introduced to sustained applause, one by one in order of jersey number. When team announcer Beasly got to number 12, he didn't even finish saying "team captain" before he was completely drowned out by a roar and chants of "Ig-gy Ig-gy Ig-gy". Same thing for Mikka Kiprusoff, and nearly as much so for Flames' tough guy/enforcer Kristof Oliwa.

Memo to all other NHL teams for next season: keep your heads up when you play the Flames, or you're gonna get creamed.