If you follow hockey, you might have noticed an extra team in the league this year — the Las Vegas Golden Knights. This year’s expansion team is the first one since Jacob’s been watching, and I think partly because he can mix and match players to make his own team in NHL ’14, he understood the draft pretty well. Which in turn garnered a bit of excitement in him that I encouraged and nurtured, and voila! Jacob is a newly-minted Golden Knights fan!

When I combined that with my 50by50 efforts, I added a Senators game to my list of activities for the year and it made sense to make it the Golden Knights game (the only time they visit this year). It was just happenstance that it fell on a Saturday afternoon too, which made it easy to take Jacob. Which is odd wording, as it wasn’t like I would have been let out of the house without him.

Earlier, we had bought LVGK t-shirts, and Jacob has dubbed the two of us “Golden Friends”. I’ll take that nickname any day! 🙂

And since it is likely to be our only regular season NHL game this year — he preferred that to trying for tickets to the Winter Classic, even though the Canadiens are playing the Sens outside — I figured I might as well get us some decent seats. Golds, first level, about even with the face-off circles, eight or nine rows up. They were awesome seats!

But don’t just take my word for it, check out the pics below. We were even low enough that we were visible on TV (I viewed it later at home…the last four photos, I’ve added little red circles to show where we are in the pic).

Of the handful of games that Jacob has gone to, this was the one that he was most engaged with, partly because the seats were so good. I can’t afford to have those seats EVERY time, but it was good this time. And I got him a puck with the date and logos on it, so it was all good for him. Although I think he also enjoyed the extra room for our legs as he got to put his feet up on the railing in front of us for most of the game. He did NOT enjoy so much having the guy behind us accidentally spill a bit of beer on his head, but that was quickly forgotten.

And miracles of miracles, the LVGK won! Given their record, that wasn’t exactly a surprise, they’ve actually done really well this season. The problem is that they have gone through a TON of goalies. They traded Pickard to the Leafs as the season opened (Oct 6). Then Marc-Andre Fleury got hurt (Oct 13). Then their backup, Malcolm Subban went down (Oct 21). Which activated their third-stringer, Dansk, who did pretty good…for 9 days (out as of October 30). Moving on to their fourth goalie, and their second call up of year, it was Maxime Lagace. Who got his first-ever NHL start on October 30th, and lost his first two or three games. So by the time we saw him, he was on his third or fourth start and looking for his first win (it was also the LVGK first real road trip, and they weren’t doing as well as they had at home — keeping the games close, but no wins).

So we got to see Maxime Lagace get his first career win. And we didn’t get to see Ferguson play, their third call-up of the year, and the sixth goalie on the roster for the season. They had to get special permission from the League to draft him, activate him, and call him up. Fortunately, Maxime held on for the win.

Although, honestly, we don’t really care who wins, we just like watching a good game. 🙂 Mission accomplished.