It's A Crime.....Game Forty-Three: Penguins At Avalanche

Crunch 4 - Penguins 3 shootout

Not even a snowstorm would deter us from driving to the Wachovia Center to see the Wilkes-Barre Penguins take on the Syracuse Crunch.

We drove for 6 hours from Pittsburgh to Wilkes-Barre with snow-covered roads and very slow drivers.

There was only one accident, or as we like to call it, off-roading incident. No one was hurt and no one died so we consider the trip a success.

The game was a lot of fun and we got Colby Armstrong Bobbleheads!

There were player banners hanging from the ceiling throughout the arena and Noodles had to take a picture of the Ryan Whitney one. Of course.

Plus, parking was free and we were like ten cars from the main doors.

That was a bonus.


To our disappointment, John Curry was not the starter. But we did get quite a few creeper shots of him from the bench but he avoided our camera unfortunately.



We got to the arena in time to see the boys warming up and our seats we on the end where the Penguins shot at twice. So we had to watch the Crunch warm up.


But we're not complaining because they kept shooting pucks into the stands. We were sure that one of us was going to get konked on the noggin.

The opening video was pretty nice and there was fire and stroke lights for the opening line-up.


The Penguins first goal wasn't even celebrated by us. From our seats, we could see Mark Letestu push the puck in the net with his body/hand but the ref called it a good goal.


Luca Caputi, seen here getting dominated by a Crunch defenseman, was all over the ice. And he hunches when he skates, it's kinda odd.

There were two fights, one with Aaron Boogaard and the other with Paul Bissonnette literally beating on a Crunch player. Awesome.


The game was tied 2-2 until about a minute left in the third period. Ben Lovejoy shot the puck around the boards and the goaltender skated around the back the net to stop it. But the puck had other ideas and took a crazy bounce and went right into the net.

We were cheering like mad-women when he scored and the other boys totally mauled him.

But then the Crunch had to ruin it for us by tying the game with five seconds left.

The game went to a shootout and the Crunch won after five rounds.





And we had no idea but in the AHL you are allowed to send the same player out twice after you've gone through the first three.


You would think that a Winter Classic Kris Letang jersey would be hard to find in Wilkes-Barre but hell, we saw one. The Legion of Lemangs just keeps growing.

We drove home that night after stopping at Wegman's because it was down the street and we had to visit it.

That was definitely one road trip we would do again. Just maybe when it's not blizzarding out.

-&-

Avalanche 5 - Penguins 3

Oh, and the Pittsburgh Penguins lost.

But at least Jordan Staal scored a shorthanded goal. We are pretty proud of him for that.

It wasn't bad enough that the Penguins had to lose but we had to listen to the game on the Avalanche radio feed. Not cool at all.