Frozen Frenzy: Dream Day for Hockey Junkies

I will confess that watching TV for eight straight hours would not be my own choice for a Big Day (though we did do it once – in our defense, it was during Covid). But I appreciate that someone thought up Frozen Frenzy, and made it happen – yesterday. As a result, a particular kind of rabid hockey fan got their itch scratched.

NHL brass organized the league’s schedule so that every team played last night, and it was theoretically possible to watch at least part of every single game. Start times were staggered so that a new game commenced every half hour between 6pm and 11 pm. You could have begun watching Pittsburgh play Philly at 6pm Eastern, and kept flipping the dial ten more times, to catch the action in ever more westward venues, ending up with one California team playing another (Kings v Sharks).

Reaction, so far, seems to be mixed. Some wondered why this wasn’t skedded on a weekend so it could begin around noon and end at a reasonable hour, instead of a Tuesday night when anyone going the distance was going to a zombie at work today. (The answer is that a week night was the only time you could find 16 arenas that were free at the same time.)

But plenty of folks loved it The peakly delicious moment, for many, was a slice of a minute or so when the overtime of the Detroit game coincided with the last moments of the overtime of the Anaheim game, and ESPN split-screened the two.

One hundred and nine goals scored – third most in a single day in NHL history.

The world, I believe, sorts itself out into those who like to go deep and those those who like to go wide – the hedgehogs and the foxes, the chunkers and the splitters. You could say a Big Day like Frozen Frenzy caters to the foxes, who gleefully roamed and grazed at the buffet table. The fox “knows a lot of little things,” and on this day they hoovered up a stash, and it was good. But there’s an equally valid argument that anyone willing to iron-butt it through a whole day of hockey is a hedgehog. They knew One Big Thing – hockey. And that too was good.

As for me, I didn’t tune in at all. On another channel the Blue Jays were matching the mighty Dodgers stroke for stroke in another thing that doesn’t really matter – World Series baseball – tying up the series 2-2.

And that was really good.