In October of 1997 I was 14 years old and I didn't care very much about the NHL. For one thing, we didn't get NESN at my parents' house, and for another I was too busy watching college hockey to care.

This did not, however, mean that I was not one to attend the occasional Bruins game. I'd been to more than a few times, but the team never really captured my attention in any real way. Hockey was good — I went to dozens of NCAA games every year and played street hockey all the time — but I was indifferent to the Black and Gold, and the NHL in general. For whatever reason, it just never really caught on as a thing I should care about.

On Oct. 30, my dad got tickets to a game between the Bruins and Mighty Ducks, now in their fifth year of existence. I remember a lot of the very vague details about that game, such as that it was on a Thursday night, for example. I know that because the Bruins used to — and perhaps still do — run a promotion in which high school and college students could get half-price tickets in the balcony.

That was a good way, I presume, to get people through the doors when the team was as mediocre-to-bad as it genuinely was in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The season in question, the Bruins were coming off a 61-point campaign (this is what happens when a team allows 300 goals in 82 games, you see) after which they picked some kid named Joe Thornton first overall.

The reason I remember that it must have been a college night was that our section was filled with early-20s yahoos drunk off their asses midway through the first period. And I know they were drunk because this one particular group of, oh, let's call them yahoos, had been heckling Teemu Selanne with the same high-pitched screaming of his name — to imply that he was a woman, you see — which was each time met with uproarious laughter. The way these guys kept saying “Teemu Selanne,” with no real joke behind it other than the pitch at which it was said, was to these young men a late-90s equivalent of Woody Allen's moose bit.

Again, I didn't follow the NHL and thus didn't know Teemu Selanne from Guy Hebert. The only person on the Mighty Ducks I'd heard of at that time was probably Paul Kariya, whose transcendent performances in the NCAA six or so years earlier were still being whispered about in hushed tones whenever Maine came to town. Going 33-91-124 in 51 games will do that for your reputation in a sport as provincial as college hockey. I suppose I'd probably also seen him inexplicably show up at that Eden Prairie intrasquad scrimmage in D3: The Mighty Ducks. Kariya, though, was not at this game, continuing a holdout that lasted 32 games. Thus, the later implications from the guys a few rows behind us that he and Selanne were in a homosexual relationship seem, in retrospect, all the more non sequitur.

Instead it was Selanne by whom I found myself transfixed. This wasn't quite the Selanne of the Finnish Flash days where he scored more or less at will, but boy could he still get up and down the ice in a hurry, saddled as he was with a deeply inferior talent such as Scott Young on his line and hampered by the fact that the Mighty Ducks were on their fourth road game in six days. Despite that, I think I had probably never seen anything like Selanne's style in the sport of hockey. Not at that time, anyhow. He was magnificent, even if he only finished with three shots on goal.

I can still hear the high-pitched taunts directed at Selanne for nearly all of 60 minutes of that game, which wound up being a 3-0 win for Anaheim behind a pair of Selanne goals. To their credit, the bozos didn't leave until late, and I seem to recall they were thrown out, but maybe I'm wrong about that.

A funny story about the game comes from the AP writeup: Selanne's goal in the first period was originally credited to Young, but Young insisted he never tipped the shot. When it was changed to the rightful scorer, Selanne was shown the updated box score, and responded, “That's fine.” Classic Teemu.

I didn't know that anecdote at the time. Didn't care to read the papers about it, really. But it was on that date, 16 years and two days ago, that I became a Teemu Selanne fan. He is, to this day, my favorite player. Probably that's at least part of the reason for my entrée into enjoying the NHL at all. If you're among the people who dislike my opinions on the sport, please feel free to direct your letters to Mr. T. Selanne. Or better yet, don't.

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