In most years, I get amped for hockey season because I've neem tracking the offseason so hard. As a Wild fan, that hasn't been nearly as invigorating. Te primary stories about the home team has been the cap hell they find themselves in thanks to the Zach Parise and Ryan Suter buyouts. The only player they added in the offseason was Patrick Maroon, thought Jujhar Khaira may make the roster and Michael Johanneson was added at the deadline last season. The hope is for internal growth.
That is nerve wracking, not necessarily exciting. It's not really revving my engines as someone who is a big enough fan of hockey that I intermittently write about the game.
No, it isn't the front office machinations and the desire to see new guys for my team that has me excited. This is going to be a weird one, but all summer, especially in the last few weeks, I've just been in a lot of ice arenas I've learned much more about ice sheets than I thought I needed to know. My real life work now takes me to various construction sites, and for a variety of reasons, that has recently involved ice arenas.
I've literally been watching hockey being build from the ground up. I walked through locker rooms that had just had their plumbing studded in, and probably smelled better than they ever will in the future. I saw nets and scoreboards sitting on the ground, because they were there, and the building wasn't ready, and there wasn't anywhere to store it.
I got to visit some refrigeration rooms, where I learned about indirect ammonia refrigeration systems. This is one of the reasons for arena expansions. The ammonia units are powerful and efficient enough that you can freeze two sheets from the one unit. And they are more environmentally friendly.
One thing that the contractors on site repeated is that they "had to be ready for hockey season". Those words are true for all of us now, what with training camp and preseason underway. We all just have to be ready for hockey season.
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