Three years ago I sat about two feet away from where I'm sitting now and got set to watch a hockey game. It was the Pittsburgh Penguins taking on the Buffalo Sabres in Ralph Wilson Stadium on January 1, 2008. The game was memorable for me on a couple of levels.
About a month earlier, I was looking forward to the game because it was going to be held in the open air in a football stadium, something that hadn't been done in the United States. It had been done in a Canadian football stadium a few years back and it was going to be cool to see it done here in a venue that was likely going to be a blizzard at that time of year.
I of course, had the infection set in my foot and had the gradual decline in health through the month of December and by the time the game had rolled around I was pretty sick. Fever, convulsions and aches. I felt shitty, to put a fine point on it. Of course, I thought I had a REAL bad case of the flu and had no idea that I was in the throes of blood sepsis on the road to losing my foot.
There arfe many benchmarks I use when I mark each year since my foot was removed and the Winter Classic outdoor NHL game is one of them. Three of them have gone by now and I am still here. It seems melodramatic to do something like this, especially for me, but it is a point I use to mark time since the most significant threat to my life since it began.
They replayed it on the afternoon of New Years Day, because the one they were supposed to hold today had a weather delay that pushed it to the evening. I didn't remember most of the game because of my feverish delirium but it looks as if the Penguins, my NHL team, won in a shootout.
They didn't do as well this year, because they lost 3-1 to Washington in a driving rainstorm. Ah well.
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