I made some new friends who had come in town for a collegiate sporting event in the Austin area this past Saturday. I happened to have my phone out while sharing a car ride and talk turned to how their alma mater had done on the gridiron that day.
So I looked up the score for them.
They didn’t know it already because they hadn’t attended a football game that day. The group had not flown in to see the Mississippi State Bulldogs take on the Texas Longhorns. They had instead come to watch ice hockey.
North Dakota played an ersatz home game against Michigan State at Cedar Park’s H-E-B Center. The location was a neutral one in geography only. UND treated it as a home game in every way, including bringing their fans. Though both teams’ color schemes include green, the brighter shade predominated.
I arrived a little over an hour before the puck drop and saw the plaza in front of the arena filled with fans clad in Kelly Green. Finding attendees wearing Spartan Green proved challenging – kind of like one would think generating a decent crowd for a men’s college hockey game on a football Saturday in Texas would be.
Some schools’ fanbases have a reputation for “traveling.” It’s most common in football, where we see the likes of Kansas State and Notre Dame draw large numbers of their supporters to road and neutral-site games. But it happens in other sports, too. I’ve seen BYU fans show out for soccer games in Texas. You’ll see some loud and loyal fans of their schools’ tumblers and vaulters at the National Collegiate Women’s Gymnastics Championships in Fort Worth. And earlier this year, I went to the Spikes Under The Lights volleyball event in Arlington’s AT&T Stadium where red-clad Nebraska fans predominated.
So fandom can run deep in sports beyond America’s most popular one. It helps that the Cornhuskers have won five national titles in volleyball. UND men’s hockey team has won eight (the number one goaltender for the ’87 champs, former Dallas Star Ed Belfour, dropped the ceremonial first puck). It also doesn’t hurt that those states don’t have major league pro teams.
This U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame Game was a non-conference contest, though it matters for national ranking purposes. One can understand why the Hall of Fame has invited North Dakota to participate in eight of the last twelve editions of the annual game. The announced attendance of 6483 nearly filled the H-E-B Center.
The two teams, which featured a college record 13 first-round NHL draft picks between them, delivered an excellent game, too. The fourth-ranked Spartans rapidly answered a late-third-period UND equalizer and then added an empty-netter to clinch the win.
Unfortunately for my new-found buddies, their football team lost Saturday as well – to Youngstown State in Ohio, also on a late score. But they’re optimistic their young and talented hockey team can gel over the course of the season and make a run. And they had fun playing golf and enjoying Austin before returning to lows in the 30s back home this week.
Most still call their team the “Sioux,” a nickname officially replaced several years ago by the current one: “Fighting Hawks.” Their level of loyalty entails traveling some 1300 miles from Ralph Engelstad Arena in Grand Forks to one in Central Texas to see their team play. That’s a devotion to rival any that of any football fans.
