Doyle’s trip to the New Jersey Devils’ outdoor game

The New Jersey Devils played the Philadelphia Flyers outdoor at MetLife Stadium in front of 70,000 (cold) spectators, and I was one of them.

My son, Sam, and I bundled up and took the train to the stadium (I highly recommend taking the NJ Transit train from Secaucus; it runs every 10 minutes when there’s an event, and it drops you off right in front of the stadium).

We’ll get this out of the way first: yes, it was very cold. The game time temperature (according to my phone) was 20°, and it felt like it. But it was outdoors, it was February, and it was a hockey game. Of course it was cold.

The atmosphere was electric; we got there while the Jonas Brothers were still performing (sorry, they were at the opposite end of the stadium, so no photos). You could see on the big screens how red their ears were in the cold, but they’re troupers.

Max Weinberg of the E Street Band was there and he led the crowd in a chant of “Let’s go Devils” with his drums. Jake Clemons played the National Anthem on his saxophone.

Then the game started.

The Devils’ captain, Nico Hischier, scored on a breakaway 32 seconds into the game, and that put the home team up for good. They would go on to win 6-3, with Nico adding another goal and an assist for a three-point night.

There were a lot of Flyers fans in attendance; maybe as much as a third of the crowd. Fortunately, they didn’t have much to cheer about.

A nice touch was having the Gaslight Anthem there; the Devis use their song, “Howl” as their goal-scoring song, and the band played the snippet live after each goal. They had plenty of opportunities to play it. They also performed a set between the second and third periods.

The Jonas Brothers played again after the second period; I wasn’t sure how much overlap there would be of Devils’ fans and JoBros fans, but there were quite a few people rocking along with their songs. (I wasn’t one of them).

As I said, the Devils won, and it wasn’t particularly close, so the crowd was in high spirits as they filed out of the stadium.

Opinions expressed in the post above are those of New Jersey 101.5 talk show host Bill Doyle only.

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