That was stunning

I woke up at the crack of dawn today, spent $125 on playoff tickets, and drove 4 hours through the shadiest Canadian cities (Windsor) and its plethora of strip clubs only to arrive in Detroit.

What a culture shock for me. The first sight a visitor from Canada is greeted with is a hollowed-out shell of a building that you can actually see through.
In a brilliant act of foreshadowing, I took an image of that building. It would later become a perfect analogy for the Flames team that decided to show up only by their physical presence in the state.

The Joe Louis Arena -- like today -- is one unexpectedly ugly mofo. It's incredibly poorly designed. And ugly. Here's one of the walkways leading to the arena. It's a 1960s spaceage-era, accented with ribbed concrete. Nice.
It was poorly organized, to say the least. Canadian customers can only pick up their tickets from Will Call. Them and about 10,000 other people...we arrived 30 minutes before the game (we would've been there 1.5 hours before, had US Customs not been incredibly inept...but that's another story). We were greeted with an incredible Will Call lineup that stretches from the Joe Louis entrance, all along the right side, and to the middle of the back. Wow...

We finally made it to our seats. Amazingly, there were lots of empty seats available all game. This was not a sell out. The atmosphere is not even close to as electric or exciting as a home Flames playoff game. Most fans aren't even wearing jerseys. Free red shirts were given out to many people, and free white towels were given to everyone to make them part of the "red wave". Think of it as a pathetic "Calgary-meets-Vancouver" ripoff festival that didn't really work out. "Posers" is the first word that comes to mind.

Did I ever tell you that Calgary's scoreboard completely owns their pathetic, ghetto scoreboard? Yeah, let's just focus on that for a bit...

Speaking of ghetto, the entire arena is ghetto. Not as bad as the Detroit Tigers stadium right near by, which is visibly rusting and needs a paint job, but still bad. The design itself is terrible -- there is but one concourse for the entire arena. After the 1st period, I waited in line for 25 minutes to use the urinal and there was still a massive line behind me. It was unreal, I've never seen anything like it before in an arena. The middle-aged gentlemen behind me in line were, rather seriously, discussing how nice the new stainless steal troughs were at this particular restroom. They're stainless! Seriously! Apparently this is a luxury in Detroit...

The only positive of this game? Kipper! He was awesome today.

The rest of the team? Well. Well...Well.... I've been so infuriated today by it I will succinctly summarize what happened in the game:
Period 1: HAHAHAHAHAHA / WTF / ARGH
Period 2: Where the hell were you guys hiding?
Period 3: HAHAHAHAHAHA / Screw this, I'm bailing early to beat the border traffic

By the way, Bob McKenzie is jumping on the Fire Playfair bandwagon that I unofficially started in November. He says fire Playfair before Game 3. I cannot agree more.