The Bears, a minor league affiliate of the Washington Capitals, have 11 Calder Cup banners hanging in the rafters at Giant Center — the first from 1947, the last from 2010. They have won three A.H.L. championships since 2006. Their tickets are affordable — a ticket to a single game can be had for $18 if purchased in advance — and even though Hershey has only about 17,000 residents, the team draws fans from nearby Harrisburg, Lancaster, Lebanon and York.

Sunday’s late-afternoon game against Worcester competed against the N.F.L. playoffs on TV, but it drew a nearly full house of 10,168.

The Bears were known as the Hershey B’ars, after Milton Hershey’s five-cent chocolate bar, for a few years in the early 1930s before joining the A.H.L. in 1938. From 1936 to 2002, they played at the 7,200-seat Hersheypark Arena (nee Hershey Sports Arena), which has tight seats with wooden slats and a curved roof that held in the noise.

The Bears have been around so long and still draw so well, opponents look forward to playing in Hershey rather than in A.H.L. outposts like, say, Oklahoma City, which through Thursday was last this season in average attendance at 3,513.

“It’s one of those places where you know there’s going to be good energy, good crowds,” said Hugh Jessiman, the Binghamton Senators’ 28-year-old forward who was the Rangers’ first-round draft choice in 2003. “It’s a fun barn to play in. It’s always a challenge. You don’t want to hear them a lot when they’re scoring, but they never lack fans.”

Boyd Kane, the Bears’ 34-year-old captain, said: “It’s a lot easier to get going knowing there are going to be 9,000 or 10,000 people out there. There are big barns in the league where there are only 2,000 or 3,000 people in the building.”