Addendum To: I Played Myself

As paying ten more bucks than I needed to wasn't bad enough, I saw something at the X I didn't think I would see.  There was a merchandise stand there, selling several items related to the conference (the NCHC) and the event (the Frozen Faceoff), but not as many items as I would expect for an event of that size.  Two of the items, a shirt and a pint glass, commemorate the fact that this is the last time (or so they say) the conference will have its tournament in St. Paul (and for the first few year of the NCHC, it was at Target Center in Minneapolis)/neutral ice; starting next year and for the foreseeable future, the conference tournament will be played on campus sites.

The tag line for the event was "Last Call In St. Paul," and that slogan was on a shirt and a pint glass.  I saw the shirt (but not the pint glass) while I was walking the concourse inbetween the Semifinals on Friday and thought, "Hey, that's kind of cool."  And then I saw there were a few people at the stand, so I figured that I would continue to get my steps in, buy food (a pizza slice because it was the shortest line) and, once I got done with that, go back to the stand to purchase something.  Swear to God it was maybe 25 minutes at the most.  But once I went back to the merch table, the "Last Call In St. Paul" shirt was gone.  I never thought that, what, 5,000 people would buy enough shirts to sell out, but it sounds from the merch people that they didn't have much to sell.

What did catch my eye was a scarf.  It had the NCHC logo, the year of its birth ("Est. 2014"), and the 2025 Frozen Faceoff logo.  It makes no mention of the fact that this is the last neutral site Frozen Faceoff, but shit, this is as close to marking this "end of an era" as I'll get, especially if they don't make this scarf anymore, which, in hindsight, I doubt.  But I bought it, for $30.

I went back there last/Saturday night for the Frozen Faceoff Final.  (By the way, Western Michigan came back from a 3-0 Second Period deficit to win it in Double Overtime, 4-3.  Some kid from Prior Lake potted the Game-winner, his second of the night.  I didn't see it in person; I left early because I had to catch the last light rail, at a quarter after 11 [which got pushed back to 11:25 or so -- damn, Metro Transit has to be more accurate with that stuff], to get back to where I parked my car at Midway)  No new shirts or pint glasses.  But they still had scarves.  And now they were selling them for $25 apiece.  I looked at the sign with the price; someone printed out "25," cut it into a square, and taped it right in front of the "30."  I have no fucking clue why someone suddenly discounted the scarves by five bucks, but I feel cheated, and I feel so goddamn impotent because I want to complain to someone about it, but I don't want to come off as a whiner.  But why in the hell did they knock off five bucks on the scarf?!

So now, not only did I overpay for the ticket to that Game by $10-3, it looks as though I paid five bucks too much for that goddamn scarf.  So that's $15-8 I feel like I need to make up by not spending on something I would spend money on, like coffee and breakfast before work.  Man, that shit just pisses me off.