February 29th 1992

Since the season is over I will now be posting some of my personal experiences or stories involving The Bruins. I will probably post one per week. This story was already posted on this site when we first started it but nobody read it back then so I decided to repost it as my first summer story entry.

The year was 1992 and I was attending St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia, Canada. The previous year (1991) I with 100 of my close friends chartered a bus and went to Daytona Beach for spring break. If you have ever seen a spring break movie it is exactly the same in real life - needless to say I had a great time. So good in fact that the next year (1992) we decided to go again but this time four of us were going to drive down in a Honda Accord. Since we were driving we could stop where we wanted and see some things. The ride down was awesome but my story about that has nothing to do with the Bruins.

A week before we left I checked the NHL schedule and saw that my beloved Bruins were playing Washington on the Saturday at the end of spring break in Boston. Well at this time I had been to many hockey games but had never seen the Bruins play. Needless to say I bothered and begged the 3 people going with me (neither even a hockey fan) for days and days straight to leave spring break early and see the Bruins game. The day before we left they gave in or rather the one who owned the car gave in and I was going to see my first Bruins game - and in the Garden. We had to leave Daytona on Friday to get to Boston for the Saturday game. On Friday we left Spring Break and the other two people with us still weren't happy about leaving 2 days early. That day we drove to Washington D.C. and did some crappy tourist stuff (Smithsonian, White House and such).

The next day we left for Boston and I was on cloud nine about seeing THE BRUINS that night.
I had tickets lined up from a friend in Boston who knew a bar in the city where season ticket holders left their's to sell when not attending the game. They cost me $600.00 U.S. about $1000.00 CDN. (no exageration. This was 1992) for the 4 of them - I had to spring for them all in order to make this happen. Anyway we hit Boston at about 5:oo PM local time and checked into a hotel. We decided to shower and head to the bar to pick up the all ready purchased tickets. Mark, the car owner, was the 1st to shower and as he was in there I decided to turn on the Tube to get the news. Well just as I turned it on I saw Bruins hilites from that afternoon against Washington - It was an afternoon game!!!! (I never noticed this on the schedule and assumed it was a night game). I made 3 people leave spring break 2 days early and I chucked about $1000.00 on ticktes for a game that I never got to.

It still gets better yet. While watching the Hilites and getting cursed at I saw that the game ended in a 5-5 tie. However, as I noticed the game got stopped for some reason - the reason was Raymond Bourque had recorded his 1000th point on this afternoon and they stopped and presented him the puck.

I have not kept in touch with many of my university friends over the years but every now and then one of these three will send me an email laughing at me and saying I should not have made them leave Spring Break early.