Boston 'hockey fans' never welcome

I’m in total agreement with Mike Boone’s comments regarding the Bruins fans invading Montreal.

http://www.montrealgazette.com/sports/Boston+fans+feeling+pinch/5626180/story.html

I attended a game at the Forum in the early 80′s against Boston, and we had a couple of their pathetic fans in our blue skyboxes, otherwise known as the rafters. They both had O’Reilly jerseys on and didn’t seem to follow the puck or play, they would just wait and cheer when one of their orcs, wearing jerseys as black as their hearts, would charge one of our pure Blanc samurais. There was lots of swearing and shrillness, which was off-putting since there were families and older ladies in the area. I was there with some buddies I played rugby with, we made eye contact with them a couple of times, and they averted their jaundiced eyes and tried to behave as much as their inebriation would allow.

In the middle of the second they were down by four or five goals already, when Terry O’Reilly jumped over the boards, an action they cheered as if he were the Second Coming of Milt Schmidt. “Hunt, Terry, HUNT!!”, they bellowed, which he assuredly did, skating awkwardly in a zigzag pattern, reliably indicating the direction and area the puck was not going to by his trajectory. The fans continued their encouragement, and oinked and snarled (!) Sure enough, he finally caught up to Mike McPhee or Dave Maley, I can’t really remember, and went at him with a huge highstick and elbows high. After the scrum was separated, he put us on the powerplay long enough that we potted a couple of goals and put the game away completely. Yet our two drunken buffoons were overjoyed by O’Reilly’s charge, they didn’t see it as a poor play by an even worse player, they saw it as a cause for celebration, even as the goals against mounted.

I haven’t seen the Bruins play since. I heard some comments that the Vancouver crowd gave the Bruins fans a hard time during the finals and may have gone over the line, but I remember how a couple of Boston losers had tarnished a whole section’s experience a couple decades back, and I thought to myself that maybe the Vancouver fans were staking their territory and trying to not give those idiots an inch.