The other day I was chatting it up with one the editors I’m training to take over for me, here at the paper. He’s young, impressionable, bright-eyed, and full of promise. This Valentine’s Day, he’s also making a huge mistake.
Our conversation kind of went like this:
Me: What are you up to this weekend?
Him: Well, it’s Valentine’s Day.
Me: Right (I had forgotten, being single)
Him: I’m taking my girlfriend to the hockey game.
It blew my mind.
I kind of felt like Derek Zoolander, right after all his friends have that huge gasoline fight, and one of them goes to light up. You know, the part where he screams in slow motion. It was kind of like that, except I wasn’t as fashionably dressed.
So by now, I’m sure you’re wondering what the heck I’m writing about, so I’ll just cut to the chase. If there are two things I’ve been able to truly learn at Cornell, the first is that Hunter Rawlings is incredibly tall. The second is that you should never take a date to a hockey game.
I speak from experience, of course. I had landed a date for the Nov. 2002 Brown game, and as I walked to North Campus to meet her, I was planning things out in my head. We would walk to the game, arrive just as it was starting, take our seats. My friends would all stare at me with dropped jaws, and drool would begin to form at the corners of their mouths within five minutes into the game. Former Red goalie David LeNeveu ’05 would stop during the game, take off his mask and give me the “what’s up nod,” Hunter Rawlings would