amazing Toledo Walleye game tonight!

no, I wasn't there. I had a free (or maybe it was $1) Megabus seat to Toledo Saturday, and wanted to check out my first-ever Toledo Walleye (ECHL, affiliate of both the Blackhawks AND the Red Wings, if you can imagine such a thing) game, vs. Charlotte Checkers (the Albany River Rats of the AHL are moving to Charlotte, so I'm unclear what's happening to the Checkers), in the Lucas County Arena, which wasn't even around on my photography daytrip to Toledo (late 2008). but the Megabus stop in Toledo isn't in the heart of downtown like most of their stops (usually as close to Greyhound/Amtrak stations as they can get away with), but miles away, in the parking lot of an abandoned shopping mall. SERIOUSLY. and then the mall was torn down (I actually took the 2008 daytrip to get photos of it before it was gone, then rode the city bus--$1 fare!--into downtown). it's not a bad area (I believe a Waffle House is nearby) but you can't really get from downtown to there at night...

so I stayed in Chicago (and did something hockey-related I'll post ASAP) and stayed in tonight watching what hockey I could find online and following @ToledoWalleye on Twitter. Akim Aliu, who'd just been sent to Toledo from the Rockford IceHogs (where I saw him play last Saturday--seeing the same player in two different leagues on consecutive Sat. nights would have been interesting), scored his first Walleye goal in this game. then they were up 2-0, then the Checkers scored 4 goals to make it 4-2, but Walleye came back and scored in OT and won 6-5. TWO goals by Aliu in the game. damn, that sounds as good as anything I saw this year. usually hockey fan pages on Facebook are just horrifying in comments, but minor-league pages aren't as bad. much less inane trash talk (the NHL page) or gloating/predicting doom (Blackhawks page). since I couldn't go, this is the game recap:

 

anyway, not sure if I'll make it to a Walleye game or not. maybe it seems strange to be living in Chicago with very successful and exciting NHL and AHL teams (and I've been to some spectacular games in the past few weeks), and wishing I could see ECHL and junior hockey and college games...