As hard as it is to believe, 5,580 fans braved the snowstorm on the East Coast to witness the Flyers top the Devils in overtime in Newark. It was by no means a pretty game, but 5,580 was pretty much 4,000 more than I ever thought would ever show up to that game. Even more amazing is that that 5,580 fans in the Prudential Center is close to the Devils average attendance for days where there is no blizzard. Of course, close to half were decked out in orange, but New Jersey will take any win like that it can get when you consider what the IZod Center looked like tonight at the start of the Bucks-Nets game.
Are there even 10 people there at all? Sometime tomorrow I'll have to find an official attendance number, but if the Nets thought that there putrid record was embarrassing, man, seeing a completely empty arena is downright embarrassing. Of course 2 blizzards in 4 days certainly is not encouraging attendance, but 5,580 people successfully made it to the Devils game. The Devils game!
The good news for those Nets fans is that none of them will have to worry about any traffic on the way back.
(FYI, Part 5 of The High School Years will be up tomorrow. Get pumped....or something like that.)
First of all, congrats to the Eagles on clinching a playoff spot! My theory is all that matters is that you get into the postseason and anything can happen from there. The Eagles are in and have saved me from having another Week 17 heart attack, plus they have guaranteed themselves a 1 and 12 shot at winning Vince Lombardi's Trophy.
Secondly, during the Niners-Eagles game today, the Fox cameras caught a very curious incident involving the Eagles mascot (named Swoop) and the snow. Check it out.
DOWN GOES SWOOP! DOWN GOES SWOOP! DOWN GOES SNOOP!
At first you wonder what happened but when the snow bounces up, you know that the only thing that happened was Swoop taking an unplanned dive into some white stuff.
With the exception of my upcoming story this spring/summer, I generally keep my personal stories to a minimum on my blog. But when a night as epic as last night occurs, it's guaranteed to get a post on here. If you look at my tweet bar, you may notice that I am talking about an epic snowball fight. Well, this is the story. Naturally, it's not going to be the same or have the same feel watching it as you did experiencing it, but believe me it was one of the most awesome nights ever.
So here's my story. I was at the library last night working on a project for a class (and intermittently tweeting as a means of procrastination). The library closes at 12, so I left at 11:15 as it was snowing hard and the snow was sticking and I wanted to get out of there before it got any worse. As I am walking down to my dorm building, a girl in the snow falls right behind me. Naturally, whenever you hear a "WHOA!" out of nowhere, your initial reaction is to be startled and to turn and stare. Well, I turn around, realize what happened, say hi and ask if she's okay. She gets up with help with her friends but as she is getting up, she randomly pelts me with a snowball. I was not aware of what was going on 30 yards down the way (visibility was not great and the wind made the outdoor acoustics not particularly strong), and while I am not sure if she ever was, little did I know how much of a sign of things to come it was.
I continue walking. 15 yards later, I got pelted with another snowball out of nowhere. I still have not figured out where it came from of who threw it. Anyway, I walk down some steps, and I see it. A giant snowball fight between my dorm and the dorm across the way. Awesome.
I find some of my friends behind a poll in the building and ask what on earth is going on and how did it start and you know, the normal for walking into that situation (I later found out that 6 guys, some of whom I know, on the floor below me went out in their boxers and apparently a snowball or 2 got thrown and it escalated from there). I go up to my room, put my backpack away and join in on the fun.
Now I don't have a really great arm nor do I have great accuracy so my participation was much limited, but between 11:30 PM and 12:30 AM last night, some of the events that took place included the 2 dorms throwing snowballs back and forth at each other, our dorm getting completely pelted with snowballs (photos below), me getting knocked upside the head with a snowball (it will be 2 weeks before I can play in the NFL again), people from another dorm, Elwell, the largest dorm on campus, coming up and challenging us whereby my dorm and Luzerne (the dorm we were fighting) teaming up to throw snow balls at them only to chase them away with snowballs, the bitch GHD in our dorm calling the police (we think it was her at least; she absolutely would do it), one police car pulling up to the side of the fight only for us good college kids to throw snowballs at the police car (no need to worry, I did not physically throw a ball at the police, although I certainly laughed my ass off at it happening), and a quick retreat inside after that only for the GHD to threaten to throw someone in their underwear outside and lock them out there if they were not quiet.
At this point, I had been out there for an hour and my hands were completely numb and purple, so I went into a bathroom and ran them underwater for a good while to get the feeling back. I decided to go upstairs and watch the rest of the fight from up there with some friends as the police knew about us (and believe me, we were making our fair share of noise in the Bloomsburg night) and with my luck, I would have done something stupid at the wrong time that would have ended up with me in handcuffs. As I watched, Elwell then came back, started throwing snowballs like no tomorrow and everyone from my dorm and Luzerne retreated up to our Academic Quad with the people from Elwell chasing them. At that point, all the action in front of our dorm is over and I decide to go downstairs and check out the damage to our building. Snowballs were stuck to it everywhere, it was one of the funniest things I have ever seen. The glass doors were covered in white snow and water as was many of the bricks. Anyway, I decide, you know what, what the heck, I am going to go back out there on the Quad and join back in the fun. After all, when you are going to see and experience anything like this again. So as I'm going up there, I'm about to join in the fight and all of a sudden the police make another pass. Now nothing harmful was going on, but at the same time, I was not going to risk my entire future career over a snowball fight (no matter how epic it was). I decide to turn around and call it a night. Besides, I was tired and needed to wake up early today to make a phone call only to have the person that I needed to reach not answer the phone.
Regardless, here are some photos of the snowball fight between the 2 dorms courtesy of Facebook with the video of the fight on the Quad at the very bottom. Not only was it an epic night time snowball fight, but the lighting there really was perfect for such an occasion as you will see.
While not taken by me, this is a similar image to what I saw when I came from the library.
Luzerne pictured here. Again, the lighting was perfect for an epic night.
Another shot of Luzerne
A good shot of the fight
Chasing someone.....not sure if my friend took this as we chased Elwell or the po po car.
My dorm covered with snowballs
And now, here is a 3-minute video of the 500-1,000 people free-for-all that later on occured on the quad!
Simply epic.
Update: It also appears as if CNN thinks that our snowball fight was epic as well. So much so that they featured the snowball fight on their iReport!!! Check it out!
Okay, so it's the same video I linked to above and they only have a paragraph of text, but anytime your school ends up on CNN and police spraying mace on the face of innocent students is NOT involved, you know it's going to get a linked here.
As much as I hate to say this, I will actually be perusing various news shows tonight, both local and national, to see if anyone mentions us at all. I mean really, can you honestly say that you have ever seen a snowball fight quite like this one?
I'll post an updated version of my World Cup Qualification post either later tonight or tomorrow, but for now, just sit back, relax, and watch this own goal by Poland that ultimately wound up sending Slovakia to their first World Cup since the break of Czechoslovakia. Oh, yeah, one more thing, this goal took place in the snow!
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Good times! And congrats to Slovakia on advancing to the World Cup!
And aspeaking of snow in October, Bloomsburg is currently under a winter storm watch from tomorrow morning through Friday morning! I have seen many odd weather happenings in my life, but not once have I ever lived somewhere where snow fell in the month of freakin' October!
Are there even 10 people there at all? Sometime tomorrow I'll have to find an official attendance number, but if the Nets thought that there putrid record was embarrassing, man, seeing a completely empty arena is downright embarrassing. Of course 2 blizzards in 4 days certainly is not encouraging attendance, but 5,580 people successfully made it to the Devils game. The Devils game!
