Hitting home turf
Posted: Sun Jan 23, 2005 2:29 pm
The snow that finally fell heavy outside Xcel Energy Center on Friday evening signaled the arrival of real hockey weather. Inside, all the usual spectacle of big-time professional sports -- blaring rock music, concussive fireworks, a whirling, fleshy dance team -- accompanied the debut of the National Lacrosse League, a 10-team, indoor-version of North America's oldest sport.
While the NHL's rich and richer squabble on, helmeted, padded Canadians -- with one American exception -- wielded sticks as they might on a winter's night were this any other season. Except this time, absent skates, with netted sticks carried at shoulder height, they propelled a 5-ounce hard rubber ball at high speed toward waddling, protected goalies whose excess girth could have left them mistaken for a costumed halftime sumo-wrestling contestant.
The Minnesota Wild's parent company purchased an expansion franchise -- its rights acquired from a dormant team in Montreal -- and opened for business Friday night at Xcel Energy Center, which, because of the NHL's work stoppage, hasn't been the site of a Wild game since April.
Minnesota Swarm officials said the new team sold more than 13,000 tickets for Friday night's home opener, a 15-10 loss to the Buffalo Bandits. The winter's first snowstorm, however, helped limit attendance to an announced audience of 5,884 fans, who shuffled in from the cold and surrounded a green artificial turf field on which is played a speedy, physical sport that alternately conjures hockey, basketball and football.
"Controlled chaos," said Swarm General Manager Marty O'Neill, describing a sport first played centuries ago by American Indians across what is now Canada and the northern United States.
Structured into four 15-minute quarters separated by a halftime, lacrosse offers new observers such familiar conventions as a shot clock, faceoffs, power plays and penalties such as slashing, holding and roughing, after which transgressors head to the proverbial penalty box to think about what they've done.
Hitting home turf
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