Eurolanche

My first game on TV

It crazy to think that despite all technological disadvantages, I still remained loyal to a club, whose first game I saw in 2003, three entire years after I first began to be interested in it. Up until then, I only followed the performance of its players Matrix-style via teletext.The only exception was the German sports channel DSF (known nowadays as Sport1), which by the time gained cult status and broadcasted short highlights. Because hockey was never among the major sports in Germany, the aforementioned highlights were only a couple of minutes long. Pay-per-view sports channels were still a distant utopia.

I became more skilled with the internet, which I began to use in 2002 as a 12-year-old. I’ve spent entire days in our local internet café, which were becoming wildly popular in Slovakia at the time. I first had access to the internet at home four years later. Up until then, I was just learning the ropes. I finally had the chance to open the official website of the Colorado Avalanche. It was an unbelievable feeling. Although videos weren’t available, I finally had access to photos (and finally found out how the players look), as well as current and past stats. I remember this time fondly, because nowadays, we take modern technology, as well as high-speed internet for granted. I savored every piece of information back then, because it wasn’t only time-consuming, but also financially difficult to learn anything new. Even my mother letting me go to the internet café with my peers was a huge win. It goes without saying that I had to borrow money from her, 20 Slovak crowns for an hour of internet if I remember correctly. I gave them to the Asian guy who ran the café, who then wrote me an access code on a little piece of paper and I was clear to browse the vast spaces of the internet. Sometimes, I even had some money left to buy a soft drink. I had to save every piece of data I wanted to take home on a floppy disk. And how many documents it could hold! They were very valuable to me, because I considered them a perk of modern technology. I still have them lying around somewhere at home, but I won’t open them any time soon, because I don’t have anything to put them in. Thanks to them, I could look up downloaded websites at home as well (I got my first PC when I was 13) and even made my first folder named Colorado Avalanche.

The internet and teletext. Those were two elements I mainly responsible for me remaining an Avalanche fan during my first three years despite never seeing any of their games live, from a replay or even in the form of highlights. Both gave me an unlimited amount of information, which I began to process into a personal archive. There wasn’t an unlimited number of websites as there are today, where you could retrospectively find any information you desired. You also have to take into account the fact that I only got to visit the internet café occasionally. It just wasn’t possible to access older data and information. That’s why I told myself prior to the 2001-02 season that I’ll continue writing my own ‘score book‘ as I did the season before. Thus, I began a tradition, which lasted for eight years.

I divided my notebooks into two categories – game notebooks and secondary ones. The first notebook containing game results has two labels on its cover – The 2001-2002 season of the Colorado Avalancheand The 2001-2002 playoffs of the Colorado Avalanche. I put both labels there before the season began. At the time, the Avs making the playoffs went without saying. The first game I recorded in the oldest notebook I still possess was a game against the Pittsburgh Penguins on October 3, 2001. Colorado won 3-1 thanks to goals by Nedorost, Sakic and Drury. The visitors cut the deficit to two thanks to Robert Lang’s marker.The stats from the following games were pretty similar – I only wrote down the goal scorers and left out the players who assisted them. I also included the scores after each period and the attendance (only 18 007 at the time in Denver, which I wrote down automatically). I still remember November 3, 2001, when Colorado played in Toronto. During a visit at family acquaintances, I randomly found out that the Avs played this game. It was the very first time I forgot Colorado played a game. At the time of this book being published, this repeated itself only once and, hopefully, for the last time.

In case you’re interested in the unabridged, colored PDF version of the book, contact us at eurolanche@eurolanche.com. The physical copies are all sold out.