Boston Bruins: Fans back at TD Garden is complete sports euphoria
When Boston Bruins winger David Pasternak scored his third goal of the night late in the third period on Saturday evening, the hats came flying down onto the TD Garden ice, and the building practically erupted. The game was effectively out-of-reach for the visiting New York Islanders, and the party was officially on.
It’s hard to blame the fans for getting a bit excited. After more than 14 months of “bubbles,” empty arenas, and reduced-capacity crowds, Saturday night marked the first Boston Bruins game played in front of a full-capacity TD Garden in 448 days.
When the Bruins and the Tampa Bay Lightning squared off at the Garden on March 7, 2020, no one had any idea that it would be well over a year before fans would fill the building once again.
But less than a week later, the COVID 19 pandemic shut the entire world down. The NHL suspended its season indefinitely, and all of a sudden, Bruins fans could no longer flock to Causeway Street to watch their team play.
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Boston Bruins fed off fans back at full capacity
When the NHL season finally resumed more than four months later, it was inside the “bubbles” that the league set up in Toronto and Edmonton. The Bruins finished their season in the Toronto “bubble”—losing to the eventual-champion Lightning in the second round of the playoffs—and then returned home to Boston, where TD Garden continued to remain unoccupied.
This past January, after nearly 10 months away from their home, the Bruins finally returned to the Garden. But with COVID cases in the U.S. hitting record-high levels, the games continued to be played in front of empty arenas, just as they had been in the “bubbles” the summer prior.
But around the same time, the first COVID 19 vaccines were authorized in the U.S. Even as the dark days continued, a brighter future—both for the world and for the NHL—began to appear down the line.
In late March, Bruins fans were allowed back into TD Garden for the first time in over a year. Sure, it was only at 12.5 percent capacity, and attendees were required to wear face coverings, but at long last, Bostonians could go and cheer on their favorite hockey team once again.
As vaccinations continued to rise and COVID cases continued to fall, that 12.5 percent went up to 25 percent, just in time for the Bruins’ first round playoff series with the Washington Capitals.
And then, with more than 50 percent of Massachusetts’s population fully vaccinated again COVID, governor Charlie Baker announced that effective May 29, sporting events could have full-capacity crowds once again. And lone behold, that same date happened to mark the start of the Bruins’ second round playoff series against the Islanders.
When the fans began to pack TD Garden on Saturday night, you could feel the pent-up energy of the 14 months prior. After more than a year away, Bruins fans were ready to rock the building like it hadn’t been rocked in far too long.
The result? One of the most electric atmospheres that you’ll ever see.
TD Garden has hosted countless big events over the years, including three Stanley Cup Finals and two NBA Finals.
But I’m not sure that I’ve ever seen an atmosphere quite like what took place on Causeway Street Saturday night.
In one evening, Boston Bruins fans let out more than 14 months worth of cheers, jeers, boos, chants, singing, and towel-waving. They needed to take out all of the frustrations of the past year on someone, and the Islanders were just unfortunate enough to be the victims.
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As the TD Garden crew cleaned all of the hats up off the ice after Pasternak’s third goal, the crowd gleefully sang along with the various songs that blasted throughout the arena.
As analyst Pierre McGuire put it on the NBC broadcast, it was “a celebration of life.”
For more than a year prior, Bostonians had been forced to socially distance from each other in order to reduce the spread of COVID.
But on Saturday night, the only social distancing inside of TD Garden took place on the scoreboard, where there was plenty of space between the Bruins’ five goals and the Islanders’ two.