I’ll admit that it had been a few years since I had been to a junior game when I first walked into Yardmen Arena back in the fall of ’94. At that time, NHL teams were locking out the talent, and arenas — famous and old or new-fangled and history-deficient — were dark. The CHL was the best game still out there being played, one that still felt in proximity to the grassroots rather than like a big business that took for granted the people in the seats. An embittered fan could complain that the old school was being cast aside and not slowly, that a lot of the personality was drifting out of the sport, that one NHL game looked pretty much like another.

Not so in Belleville. There the Bulls had ties to tradition, they were quirky and the game didn’t look the same — not even the rink did. The vast majority of seats at Yardmen Arena were to one side of the ice, rising behind the benches; there were no stands at all behind either net. Given the few seats, including those reserved for the radio crew and reporters, looking across the ice to the benches, Yardmen had nothing remotely symmetrical about it. You wondered if the architect who drew up the plans had ever been to a rink before. And on top of that was the sheet itself: Yardmen had an Olympic-sized ice surface, the thinking evidently being that the game was heading in that direction, that eventually all teams would go to the international standards. Of course, it didn’t play out that way; the sheet was an anomaly and, as such, a tremendous home–ice advantage. “When we first came into the league, after the expansion draft people said we’d be lucky to win five games our first season,” says Larry Mavety, who assumed the duties of coach and GM of the Bulls after having been behind the bench of the Tier II team in Belleville. “The big ice was a game-changer. It really came as a shock to the teams that hadn’t seen it before. You couldn’t race around, trying to run guys or they’d be by you. It really threw off goaltenders. They had so much trouble with their angles.”