When the puck dropped at the 2023 Tim Hortons NHL Heritage Classic in Edmonton on Sunday afternoon it officially marked the 38th time that the NHL has hosted an outdoor regular-season game.
If you were to have made a pure guess based on the energy and enthusiasm of the jam-packed crowd at Commonwealth Stadium, however, it would have been an understandable mistake to have believed that it was the very first.
Far from a novelty that has ran its course and been bled dry, the game — a 5-2 win by the host Edmonton Oilers over their provincial rival Calgary Flames — was a smashing success, in both fan experience and surely financially as well.
Despite some last-minute uncertainty due to unsold tickets, potentially caused by the woeful early-season performances of both teams leading up — each was separately booed by their home fans in their final games before the event, occurring on the very same night — the game was eventually announced as a sell-out. When walking around the home stadium of the Canadian Football League's Edmonton Elks, trying to navigate through the wall-to-wall sea of people, it certainly felt like there were 55,411 fans in attendance. It's impossible to say how many of the people in the massive, seemingly endless lines for food or the bathrooms failed to make it back to their seats in time for the puck drop of each period, but it's fair to say that the number is likely double for those who were in line for beer.
The atmosphere throughout was electric. Any fan nerves coming in about how their teams would perform on the ice were quickly and easily overpowered by the joy derived from the sheer spectacle of it all. Merchandise booths scattered throughout the concourse that sold limited-number, Heritage Classic-specific treasures were picked clean and stripped to their table-and-tent skeletons like unlucky animals dropped into a piranha tank, with warm toques unsurprisingly being the hottest seller. The air was plenty chilly, and the coldness gradually kept growing and building as the early-evening sun finally set at about midway through the festivities, but that just made everything better, somehow. More appropriate. More fitting.
While it certainly helped that scoring chances in the game started almost immediately, how it only took 4:19 of game time for the first goal to be recorded, and how there were a perfectly sufficient seven goals scored in total, none of those things were really necessary to keep spirits high. The beleaguered Flames team didn't give their outnumbered fanbase in attendance much to actually cheer for, but there seemed to be an unspoken agreement that the fully justified griping could at least wait until Monday, so as to not kill the vibe too much.
Local indie rock group the Rural Alberta Advantage was brought in to be the house band, and really, you couldn't draw it up more perfectly than that. And whether you love them or hate them, having Alberta's homegrown sons Nickelback play on the main stage adjacent to ice level during the second intermission was the right decision. Flanked by both fire and fireworks, they opened their three-song set with their cover of Elton John's “Saturday Night's Alright For Fighting,” which certainly ranks right up there among hockey's unofficial theme songs regardless of the version. The crowd was largely into their performance and there was plenty of singing along, even if some of those singing might now deny ever doing so.
The 2023 Heritage Classic wasn't the NHL's first outdoor game, and it also won't end up being their last. What matters the most, though, is that it was entertaining and memorable and paid appropriate homage to the cities and province that were being honoured and celebrated, which has has turned out to be a tried and true winning formula for these sorts of things. If future outdoor games take a similar approach then they, too, will likely produce local hits than fans won't soon forget, much like this one was.