Slipper's first Canucks game

Well, we took Slipper (a.k.a. Hol's belly) to his/her first NHL game tonight. We went with our good friends Trish and Erik to see the Canucks take on the league-leading Anaheim Ducks.

Funny that the Ducks have dropped the "Mighty" and the Disney duck mask logo and all other things that initially made them such a dorky team. Now they're left simply as unthreatening waterfowl, which I guess was meant to be an improvement. Regardless of how dumb their name is, they are at the top of the league, so we can't find too much fault with them.

So, pre-game: we all met up downtown, had a lovely/quick meal of wraps, stopped by the chocolate shop for hedgehogs and the like, and took the skytrain to GM Place. (Speaking of stupid names... What if we did that with our child? "Oh what a lovely baby, what's their name?" "McDonalds Telus Broadland, brought to you by Pepsi. You love your Pepsi, don't you, little one?") Once at the stadium, we trekked all over the place, due to a) an initial lack of intelligent navigation by yours truly, and b) a clueless ticket-taker at one of the gates. Curses! But we finally found our way in, and found our seats - not bad, at least two or three rows from the ceiling! But like they say (and it's true), there are no bad seats in GM Place. Probably because GM is such a fine class of automobile...

The game itself was pretty good - the Sedin twins were solid as usual on the boards, and I thought Linden and Cooke were the two guys trying the hardest. We were pretty even for the first half of the game, but Anaheim started to show their superiority towards the end. We took a lot of questionable penalties (they're always questionable when they're against your team) and Luongo let in one weak goal and one really tough one. We ended up losing 2-1. Oh well. Slipper didn't seem to mind.

Funny moment of the game: During commercial breaks and between periods, Fin (the orca whale Canucks mascot) was doing his usual thing, and rocket-launchering (if that's not a real word, I claim first usage) bundled-up T-shirts into the audience. One of them came launching up towards us, and was almost magically drawn straight to this guy's beer - it knocked it out of his hand, and all over himself and his neighbours. I think he was a little ticked. We had a good laugh. I think Slipper enjoyed it, too.

I'll close with a couple pictures of us, all decked out for cheering...