My family took a road trip to see the 10th-to-last game at MLG on December 21, 1998. Here are my memories of the joint:
- It looked incredible lit up from the outside on game night. Our hotel room overlooked the roof with its huge maple leafs. The marquee was fantastic and inspiring for a young hockey fan. Being a Depression-era building it just seemed so solid and permanent, and at the time it was hard to imagine that it wouldn't host the Leafs forever and ever.
- We arrived before the gates opened, so the foyer was crammed with people waiting in line. Bear in mind this was at a time when the Hurricanes weren't even in Raleigh yet, so we were coming from a place where people just didn't talk about the NHL very much. So it was almost miraculous for me to be elbow-to-elbow in a crowd where everyone was talking hockey, talking about stats and who might make the playoffs and everything else the same way we do here on HF. Canada seemed more foreign to me at that moment than at any other time during the trip.
- During warm-ups I explored the building, especially down near the locker rooms. Like other old arenas, everything was just so much more accessible than in newer barns. There was a sort of promenade where the players walked out of the locker room toward the ice, and that was jammed with cheering fans 5 rows deep when they left for warm-up. The old original zamboni, which looked like a blue old-fashioned ice cream cart, was on display above the doorway where they entered the playing area.
- Not that I have anything against the banners hanging in the ACC, but the ones in MLG were so much more graceful, tapering down to a fork. Just blue with the white leaf and a date, no other graphics. Same with the honored numbers - just a white banner with blue name and number, plus a couple of blue stripes like on the uniform. I remember wondering how long ago some of them must have been hung up.
- The scoreboard was awful by modern standards, but charmingly out of date. It had an LED display with a bunch of burnt-out bulbs, showing crappy graphics and of course no replays.
- The seats were just terrible, grays up in the balcony that were so narrow you could barely sit in them comfortably. Springs were starting to poke through the seats and they annoyingly popped up if you stood. By far the worst arena seats I've ever experienced.
- To this day I still don't understand the "railing" seats at the end of the rink. Was it because the place was so steep you might fall over? I dunno.
- Inside and out, the place just felt like hockey itself. I remember hearing someone complaining because the Leafs won 7-1 so it wasn't much of a game. I still don't quite understand what that means, but clearly that guy was quite accustomed to having a world-class hockey tradition at his fingertips. That's how everything felt, not necessarily the "nicest" but top-class in terms of history and legacy.
