This weekend (Saturday), I returned to a few things: 1: seeing (#18, at least this past weekend) Cornell in action 2: visiting the Princeton campus 3: college hockey in general, about a week or so after returning from the cruise!
This time, though, I killed a few afternoon hours in the "PATH area", between the mall (Newport) in Jersey City, right near the NJT light rail/PATH stations located downtown there, before heading over to mid-Manhattan, where I waited a bit longer before what taking what, thankfully, turned out to be an "express" NJT train along its "red" line, the Northeast Corridor line, skipping the stations in Elizabeth, Linden, Rahway, and along Jersey Avenue in New Brunswick, only stopping at the "bigger" stations, like Secaucus, Newark Penn, EWR, the Metropark facility, Metuchen, Edison, and New Brunswick, before stopping at Princeton Junction (at least I did) for the "Dinky" shuttle to Princeton University that shuttles between both of those stations!
Just an FYI, if you or anybody (else) you know will be on the Princeton campus anytime soon: there's also a full-service Wawa location (as in, the (locally) famous convenience store chain) right off the shuttle train platform that is (reportedly) open 24 hours, along with having just about everything most Wawa locations have, from ATMs, freezers, and restrooms to those self-ordering kiosks that have increasingly appeared in fast-food restaurants in recent years! Also, since I mentioned the ATMs, I should also mention, again, as a service, that you might get bills in increments of $10s, instead of increments of $20s each, as most typical ATMs do, likely making that place even more convenient than you thought before reading this!
The game itself was quite something, after Cornell made the trip after defeating Quinnipiac in Hamden, CT, and Princeton played to a scoreless tie against Colgate at home, with tons of Cornell fans having made the trip down to Princeton (which I'm certain will be the case again in just a few short weeks, when Boston U. meets Cornell at MSG right after Thanksgiving, in quite the contrast to the team's game v. New Hampshire last Thanksgiving weekend, or any of the non BU-Cornell games there over the years, when the Garden was only about half-full, and there were quite a few attendance complaints); incidentally, perhaps I should mention that I'll personally be coming to you from approximately the middle of section 223 of the Garden that night...
Last time, I mentioned that Princeton's rink is among the oldest in college hockey, and it sure still looks the part this season, with everything still not having been renovated since the mid-'80s, except for the roof and sound system; the roof was reportedly renovated in the early 2000s, and the sound system was reportedly upgraded circa 2010; also, speaking of the sound system, neither school's band appeared, so Princeton was more than glad to show off some apparent changes to the building's sound system, with more of a "fog" horn instead of a "train" horn, a different "goal song" after Princeton goals, and a "roaring tiger" sound effect that played after every announcement of Princeton's goal/assist scoring, although, if you ask me, that thing sounded too similar to MGM Studios' various "lion" mascots for comfort there...
It only took Cornell about the first 1:45 of the game and a "man advantage" to open the scoring, although after that, as games featuring such incredibly early goals tend to go, things mostly slowed down for the minutes following that goal, although Princeton answered with the man advantage about halfway through the period to create the first of more than one tie throughout the night, only for Cornell to get another goal that Princeton would end up answering not just once, but twice, all within the last two minutes or so remaining in the opening period!
Princeton took that 3-2 lead through the first intermission, during which the kids who took the ice could only manage a single goal between their teams, showing that they most likely hadn't witnessed what had happened between the college teams just minutes earlier, and added another goal against Cornell's backup goaltender about five minutes into the middle frame, stretching its lead to 4-2, and afterward, seemed poised to extend the lead to 5-2, taking the majority of the shots for a few minutes, but then Cornell tied things up once more with a pair of goals in under a minute about halfway through the period, taking the majority of the shots after that to send the game to its other intermission tied 4-4!
Cornell kept up the pressure through the beginning of the third period, as the amount of hitting between both of the teams also increased, finally
2 more things:
1: as I mentioned last February, there's no shot counter in Princeton's building (UPDATE: not anymore!), but, reportedly, Princeton just outshot Cornell for the game, 25-22;
2: as you can probably tell, Princeton changed its center ice logo to its apparently "secondary" logo, a stylized "tiger head", instead of the university's "shield" logo that was there last season!
No comments:
Post a Comment