SALT LAKE CITY — Sean Durzi entered a suite earlier this season to greet his neighbors who had come to the Delta Center with some curiosity. The Utah Hockey Club defenseman ended up holding a mini-hockey seminar.
“They had every question in the book,” Durzi said. “I could have talked for two hours just answering questions about hockey.”
Flash forward to earlier this week: He was stopped by some of those same community members now talking about the team’s power play and penalty kill.
The times, they are a-changin’.
“We couldn’t have named one person in NHL (last year),” one fan said with a laugh. “And now we’re sneaking broccoli in to throw on the ice.”
As luck would have it, some broccoli ended up on the ice — a nod to netminder Karel Vejmelka — following Utah’s final home game on Thursday, a 4-3 loss to Nashville in a shootout.
“It’s kind of cool. I have to start eating more broccoli for lunch,” said Vejmelka, who was named the team MVP.
The end result was disappointing — Utah jumped out to a 2-0 lead before having to force overtime with a goal in the third, only to lose in the shootout — but ultimately unimportant.
The team had been eliminated from the playoffs the night before due to a Minnesota Wild win, and so the final game at the Delta Center served as celebration of the inaugural season.
There are plenty of highlights during Utah’s first year: The electricity of the first game, Vejmelka’s 49-save performance, Dylan Guenther’s overtime-winner in his first game after an injury, Mikhail Sergachev’s winner in the waning seconds, and plenty more.
But the biggest story of the inaugural season might just be the community that has embraced a team and a sport.
“The fans almost sensed something special, not only with us but with the state,” Durzi said. “Everywhere we go now, everyone’s talking about hockey. It’s cool; there’s just a buzz.”
Fans showed up in droves to welcome the team back in April, with the Delta Center not able to hold all that wanted to come inside for what essentially was a pep rally. At that point, hockey was a mere novelty to most, it was the new show in town for a state that has long latched onto athletics.
“There was little uncertainty, not really knowing how we’d be accepted,” Guenther said.
Any lingering doubts were fanned away months later by thousands of twirling white towels after Guenther scored the franchise’s first goal with a masterful one-timer in the team’s first-ever game. Many tuned in with mild curiosity, tipping their toe in the hockey waters (eh, ice?). Soon enough, though, a hockey town had been born.
“I never would have thought I’d know who was on the Nashville lines,” one female fan said on Thursday. “Or even what lines are.”
The team has felt that knowledge grow.
In the early parts of the season, the cheers came from the obvious things — the goals, the fights, the big hits — but there was a lot of stuff in between that most hadn’t caught on to yet. That led to some sleepy moments at the Delta Center, with the arena being met with anticipatory silence.
It’s different now.
“Since the break, I feel like everybody’s in the game at the right moments; they’re giving us boost,” defenseman Michael Kesselring said. “So it’s been really, really fun.”
Added Durzi: “Now they’re starting to understand power plays, penalty kill, bad calls. They’re giving it to the refs.”
And creating bonds along the way.
One father said that he got season tickets to bring his friends to games; but once his 8-year-old daughter asked to come along in an early November, she wouldn’t give up the ticket.
“She has a shrine of Coley now,” he laughed as his daughter, who was sporting a Cooley jersey, hid her face in embarrassment. “It’s been awesome getting to share these moments with her. She’s never been a sports kid before, but she’s definitely a hockey one.”
Utah head coach André Tourigny said he didn’t know what to expect when he first arrived in Utah. He remembers Ryan Smith showing up one day and saying he’d be impressed.
“OK, what does that mean?” Tourigny recalled thinking.
But, he admits, that proved to be true.
As he left the ice on Thursday, he saw an usher with tears in his eyes as he hugged the players. That, he thought, summed up the connection the team had built with the community in its first year.
“It’s a feeling of belonging,” he said. “It’s amazing; everywhere we go, people are so enthusiastic about the team, and we cannot be anything other than grateful and excited about that.”
He’s just bummed he has to wait until the fall to feel it again.
“We’re addicted now,” he said of playing at the Delta Center. “We’re looking up for the next one. We’ll have to wait a little bit.”
He won’t be the only one counting the days.
The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.
