There was a wedding on the ice between the first and second periods of Saturday’s Gwinnett Gladiators game.  As you can imagine, unless they’re trying to recreate the ceremony from the Princess Bride, it wasn’t going to be done in a few minutes.  There is supposed to be an 18-minute break between periods and the team is fined if they go over that.  Long story short – the ceremony was taking so long our supervisor was forced to sound the arena horn in the middle of the ceremony to remind them they needed to get to the exchanging rings part ASAP.

Two people next to each other in the stands had two signs.  One read “RUN AWAY” and the other person had a Photoshopped picture of Jennifer Wilbanks (AKA The Runaway Bride) with even more-than-normal bugged-out eyes.

One of the linesman told me that at least this wedding party was dressed like an actual wedding.  There was a wedding at an ECHL game this year in Columbia, SC and the wedding party wore hockey jerseys.  While I might love the sport of hockey, getting married during a game seems about as unromantic as it gets.  The halls outside the locker rooms can smell during game time when players are putting their sweaty gloves on hair dryers to air them out.  Since this same general area is where the wedding party was getting ready, they might have been rethinking their plans after taking a whiff of those hallways between periods.

**********

The announcer has a rather dry sense of wit about him.  One of our goal judges accidentally flipped on the goal light during a scrum in front of the net even though the puck never crossed the line.  The referee skated over to confirm that it was indeed not a goal.  The announcer then said “No goal.  This is only a test.  Had this been an actual goal the referee would have signaled as such and bedlam had ensued.  This is only a test.”

**********

The team’s penalty minutes leader was given a penalty with 31 seconds remaining in the game.  He turned to me and said “I wish he had given me a Game Misconduct penalty so I could have gotten 300 minutes.”  For those of you not familiar with hockey enforcers, 300 minutes is kind of a benchmark on whether or not your season has been laden with penalties.  It’s kind of like a .300 batting average for baseball players.  At the time, he had 289 minutes so a two minute minor did him no good.  He needed the 10 minutes a Game Misconduct would gave gotten him.  Ironically, he actually would have broken the record after a game 2 weeks ago when he received, at the time, an ECHL record of 68 penalty minutes in one game.  After the league reviewed the stats they reduced it to a “mere” 53 minutes, thus robbing him of a 300 penalty minute season.