I Knew I Shouldn't've Looked

When I bought my ticket to the Frozen Four Final, I knew I was risking it.  I had bad memories of the last time the Frozen Four was in St. Paul.  Going off of my previous (and successful) stint in getting tickets to the Semifinals and Final for about $150 total back in 2011, I thought it was going to be a similar go-around in 2018.  It wasn't.  Prices and what happened when are details I have forgotten.  But I looked at the prices going into Thursday's Semis and thought that was a little higher than I anticipated, and the Final even more so.  And yet, in the days leading up to those Games, they didn't go down as sellers realized no one was buying (at least that's what all the tickets on scalper sites indicated to me).  In fact, they spiked upward, so much so that it was too rich for my blood, and I didn't go to either day.

That trauma was on my mind when I finally decided about ten days ago to buy a ticket to the title Game.  People are going to hold onto their tickets for it, and so the price isn't going to come down, so I might as well bite the bullet and buy one.  Hey, if prices go down, I will at least be able to take advantage of one ticket for Saturday's Semis.  I bought one the other day for about $50, which is great.  But I made a point of not looking at prices for the championship Game after I already bought one.  I knew I was going to kill myself if they went down.

But goddammit, I was curious.  I looked on SeatGeek and saw that prices have gone through the floor.  They are going for half what I bought.  And fucking Christ, I want to bang my head against the wall for all the money I have wasted for getting too chickenshit scared and buying too soon.  But how could I tell?  Last time I waited too long and prices shot up.  And what exactly happened to the market for this championship, anyway?  Back in '18 Minnesota-Duluth was in the Frozen Four.  I didn't think there were enough Bulldogs, both living in the Twin Cities and coming down from Duluth, to explain both the high and the increasing prices.  And I still don't: The other three finalists were Notre Dame, Ohio St., and Michigan.  I swear that those three schools are big enough that they theoretically would sell out the Xcel Energy Center.  But Michigan and Notre Dame were at the X in 2011 and I got a ticket just fine.  Why couldn't I get one at a decent price seven years later?  Was it just UMD?  And what about now, when Michigan did make it but Minnesota-Duluth didn't?  Is the reason for the diving prices the other three teams -- Boston College, Boston University and Denver?  I figure that it's the championship in top-flight men's college hockey.  From what I saw back in 2018, that was always going to be an expensive draw.

See, all these what-ifs and my desire to find out what the fuck happened and why is killing me right now, absolutely torturing me.  I am racked with guilt over all the money I have pissed away.  I could justify it by saying that I have a full-time job now, so I could deal with any money I do spend more than I should have.  But I hate my job right now, I am forbidden to get overtime and that fucking sucks, I just got home from a trip to St. Louis, and I have some big credit card bills I need to pay.  I can't afford to just spend money right now.  So I am trying to trim financial fat.  And the exorbitant price I have paid for Saturday's championship Game is a goddamn fat sow of an expense.

There might be one saving grace to all this: I haven't received the ticket yet.  I tried to download the one I bought at an exorbitant price to my cellphone, but for some reason I don't see it.  During the first Semifinal Game last/Thursday night (Denver beat BU in OT, 2-1) I actually was chatting with SeatGeek about this missing ticket.  The representative said she would ask the seller to re-transfer it to me.  As of press time, I still haven't seen it.  There might be something hinky going on, so I am going to see if this is enough of an obstacle to cancel the order and either give me a refund or a credit.  That way I can buy a ticket at a non-insane price ... and be able to look myself in the mirror and not fucking hate myself.