When was the last time you were at a professional or college sporting event that had fans in attendance?
If you’re from the Boston area and haven’t traveled elsewhere for a game, it was at least a year ago. For me, it was a Boston University-Northeastern hockey game at Agganis Arena on March 7 of last year.
I honestly couldn’t tell you much about the crowd that night. It wasn’t a sellout, and it probably wasn’t particularly raucous; BU wasn’t very good last year, so excitement wasn’t always high.
Had I known it would be the last time I’d see, hear and feel a crowd for more than a year, I probably would’ve taken some better mental snap shots.
As we all know, it was only a few days later that everything in the sports world shut down -- the NBA season, NHL season, MLB spring training, college sports across the board.
Sports would return after what felt like an eternity, but was actually just several months. There’s no question they were different without fans, but we got used to it. We were thankful just to have sports back in any form.
Still, you couldn’t help but dream about eventually getting to experience a game with fans in attendance again. For those of us who were fortunate enough to be at TD Garden Thursday night for the first major Boston sporting event with fans in attendance in over a year, we finally got that experience.
Obviously 2,191 fans isn’t the same as a full house of nearly 18,000. What we saw and heard Thursday night wasn’t exactly the deafening ovation Zdeno Chara got when he played through a broken jaw in the 2019 Stanley Cup Final.
But… it was pretty special in its own right. Just to hear all the stuff we haven’t heard in so long -- stuff that artificial crowd noise tries to but can’t really replicate.
A real roar when the Bruins hit the ice. A clear and loud “Let’s go Bruins!” chant right after the opening faceoff. The boos for an early bad penalty call against the B’s… and then the cheers when the call was overturned.
The explosions that follow a Bruins goal or a big save, and the collective “Wooh!” after the goal announcement. More chanting late in the third period of a tied game. Clapping and “Whoa-oh”-ing along to “I’m Shipping Up to Boston.”
Sure, it wasn't as loud as usual. But it was more than loud enough to hear anywhere in the building, and certainly loud enough to make a difference. It’s not “normal” yet, and won’t be for a while still, but man is it a big step on the road there.
Bruins players know it, too. It had been 384 days since they last played in front of their own fans. Coach Bruce Cassidy said before the game that they had been “pining” for this moment. They appreciated it, and wish they could have delivered a better result than a 4-3 overtime loss.
“It was cool. It’s why we love playing for the Bruins, why I love playing for the Bruins, is for moments like that,” said Anders Bjork, whose game-tying goal late in the third period drew the loudest ovation of the night. “They’re really special. I don’t think other places have it quite as special as we do. It’s something that makes all of us proud to wear the Bruins logo.
“It was awesome. I think, from my perspective, how I feel playing with the Bruins these last couple years is, especially when we’re at home, we’re never out of the game. And that’s in part due to our fans. They’re providing that energy and we wanna do it for them, do it for each other. It was exciting. It was great. I’m glad we got to stay in it there, but we weren’t satisfied with that, for ourselves and for the fans as well. We wanted that win.”
The Bruins’ next six games are all at home. The Celtics’ first home game with fans is on Monday. The Red Sox will have the same 12% capacity on opening day at Fenway Park on Thursday.
At some point we’ll all probably slip back into the same debates about whether we’re re-opening too fast or too slow, whether we’re allowing too many fans or not enough.
But for one day, let’s just appreciate the fact that fans were finally back at a major Boston sporting event, that they appeared to be safely spaced out and masked up, and that they were loud. It was a welcome sight and sound.