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In Jasper we were lucky enough to coincide with an event called ‘Hockey Night in Jasper’ - NHL Legends vs. the local ‘All Stars’ team.  For non-Canadians out there, you should know that Canadians are nuts about hockey.  If you think Australians are nuts about sport, you ain’t seen nothin’.   The Canadians are so nuts about hockey that it’s unnecessary to add the ‘ice’ part on to the ‘hockey’ part, everyone just knows what you mean when you say ‘hockey’.  An easy way to establish yourself as a foreigner is to casually ask what’s going on in the ‘ice hockey’.  If you walk around in the winter, you’ll see that every second backyard has a homemade hockey rink that Dad (or Mum I suppose) has lovingly crafted over the course of the winter - flooding it, letting it freeze, shovelling off the snow and repeating up to 50 times before it’s good enough to start skating and bashing around the hockey puck.  All the little kids play hockey, all the families go along and watch the kids play hockey, and on game night everyone (and I mean everyone) watches the hockey, either at home or in the pub.

We drove into Jasper listening to a local radio station that was advertising Hockey Night in Jasper, so we decided to go.  We arrived in the town quite late in the afternoon but still had a few hours to kill before the game started, so we did what any Canadian would do - we went to the pub, drank beer and watched a game live on the TV while we waited!  A very popular bar snack in Canadian pubs is wings - chicken wings smothered in a sauce of your choice (hot, red hot, medium hot, mild, honey garlic, explosion hot, chilli lime, etc).  I rarely eat chicken wings in Australia and certainly not by themselves - usually they’re the substandard bit of the chicken that goes into the stock pot.  In Canada they smear them with salty sauces and the challenge of getting all the meat out and sucking all the sauce off is a worthy one when drinking beer and watching hockey.  Back in the days when I lived in Canada my buddies and I would drink a lot of beer and eat a lot of chicken wings in pubs while watching the hockey, and I was therefore keen to introduce Dave to this must-have culinary and cultural experience.   Jasper turned out to be perfect for it.

The NHL is the National Hockey League and it is where all the best guys play, even if they live in Europe or elsewhere.  If you play in the NHL you are a guaranteed legend and your name will be known in Canada for ever, especially if (one) you’re really good and (two) if you’re Canadian.  Needless to say, in Jasper the NHL Legends team were extremely well received.  They were all announced with details of their NHL careers and skated out onto the ice to huge cheers from the people of Jasper.   We were sitting next to a group of young boys who were ecstatic, from which I gathered the players were quite famous - at least the one called ‘Leeeeeeemaaaaaannnn!!!!!!’ anyway.  The little boys had their noses right up against the plastic barriers that stop the puck from hitting people in the first 2 rows of seats, and they could barely contain their excitement at seeing their heroes so close.  Dave was much the same way at his very first hockey game ever!

They looked like they were veterans (they wore no helmets) but their skills were astounding.  They played a gentlemen’s game (that is, not pounding each other into the boards very hard and no fist fights), very politely wiping the floor with the local All Stars team.  They also put on a show - giving the kids next to us (and Dave who was right there with them) a high five after they scored a goal, playing two teams of tiny kids at once, having a mid-game shoot off and encouraging the referee to skate around with a hockey stick balanced on his nose.  It was an absolute blast and a fantastic experience for all involved - if you ever get to Jasper on Hockey Night, go along for sure.  You might even see Leeeeeeeeeeeemaaaaaaaannnnn!!!!!!!

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