ESPN’s Rob Parker sniffed, too, last year when he chastised Atlantans for not buying up seats in Philips Arena for a young, exciting Hawks team. And the national media took another bite when the Thrashers in 2011 became the second NHL franchise to leave Atlanta.

That hockey team went to the playoffs once between 1999 and 2011. And while they were swept in that series by the New York Rangers, “The New York Times said Philips Arena was one of the loudest venues they had seen that season,” according to Bruce Seaman, a nationally known economist who teaches at Georgia State University. We cared about hockey, and we rattled the rafters of Philips accordingly. Evidently, we cared a lot more than the owners, a group called Atlanta Spirit, which also owns the NBA’s Hawks.

Almost from the start, Atlanta Spirit began trying to unload the hockey team.They drafted poorly and didn’t develop players. The Thrashers were mismanaged from ownership down to the GM. They couldn’t compete on salaries.

Seaman says mismanagement played a significant role in Atlanta losing the NHL franchise and that Atlanta was not the first town to rebel against its hockey team’s owners. “People did the same thing in Chicago,” says Seaman, who earned his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago. When Blackhawks fans saw owner “Dollar” Bill Wirtz committing similar sins of mismanagement a decade ago, Seaman says, “they stopped going to Blackhawks games ... and Chicago is a huge hockey town.”

Atlanta fans rebelled, too. We said fix it or we’re not investing. It was never fixed. The NHL wanted Atlanta fans to buy a house with termites. No thanks.

Still, the national media concluded that Atlantans hate hockey. After the loss of the Thrashers, Seaman says, Atlanta clearly has work to do on its reputation.

“Losing the Thrashers is a stain on Atlanta as a sports town,” he says. “There is no excuse for Atlanta not to have a representative in every one of the major sports. How the hell can you lose two teams?”

Hey, I didn’t say we were perfect. But it’s worth noting that, two years after the Thrashers became the Winnipeg Jets, the ice rinks in Atlanta still have to open at 5 a.m. to accommodate the hordes of stick-wielding kids who want ice time.

We must not hate hockey that much.

Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Baltimore ... all are cities that think they colonized sports for the Western Hemisphere. But is their fandom really as rabid as they swear it is?

Once upon a time, a baseball game was played in New York that has been written about as if it were the single greatest game ever played. The New York Giants beat the Brooklyn Dodgers with the “Shot Heard ’Round the World,” which was Bobby Thomson’s home run in the last at-bat to give the Jints the NL pennant in 1951. Gosh almighty, what a spectacle.

There were 15,000 empty seats in the Polo Grounds that day, according to the great baseball writer Roger Kahn. It was apparently a spectacle worth missing.

The Polo Grounds did not hold 70,000 for baseball, or even 60,000. The Polo Grounds held 49,000, which is about the seating capacity of Turner Field. There have been plenty of games at Turner Field with 34,000 fans. In fact, the Braves have attracted an average of more than 32,000 this season alone.