On Friday night, I was watching the Maple Leafs/Sabres preseason game and learned that it was a home-and-home, with the second game on Saturday night. I asked Pauline if she wanted to go on Saturday night and she said yes. Great! but the only problem is that we didn’t have tickets…
I ended up using StubHub for the first time, which is a website where people can resell tickets to events. We got a pair of 3rd row 300s for $31 each, which is over a 100% increase of the face value ($15). That’s not too expensive because I had looked at preseason tickets at the ACC and they were $35 for obstructed-view tickets! What pissed me off is that StubHub is the same garbage as Ticketmaster. I had to pay a 10% fee (so $6.20) for using the service, and then a $4.95 fee for “getting my tickets over email”.
Having a game in Buffalo also gave us an excuse to do some cross-border shopping, which we did, and then drove through some unfamiliar and ghetto parts of Buffalo before arriving at the stadium. The event parking was only $10 which was nice as I was expecting $20 as per Toronto. There were A LOT of Buffalo jerseys (the more recent gold and blue ones, not the old black and red ones) and not as many Leaf jerseys as I thought there would be. Although I did find a pair of Leaf fans wearing jerseys with the name Miller (and numbers 1 and 35) – so they had Ryan Miller on the wrong team AND wrong number! Speaking of wrong team, I also saw full poster advertisements for Tim Connolley who is now on the Maple Leafs!
We sat above the Leafs goal in the first and third, so I saw a lot of #51 (Jake Gardiner’s) impressive skating and first pass skills. Unfortunately, Toronto played most of their regular lineup on Friday so we only saw ⅔ of the second and third lines, ⅓ of the defense. Here was the starting lineup for Toronto (Buffalo iced a much stronger team, although they were missing Miller, Roy and Pominville from their regular lineup).
(Grabovski just got thrown out so Kulemin is taking the faceoff)
The game ended up being Buffalo PP 3, Mikhail Grabrovski Crosbovski 2. Grabovski scored a couple of nifty goals, deflecting the first one off his skate and then leaping to tap in a rebound. Our PK looked shakey (couldn’t clear the puck and gave up all 3 goals) and Gustavsson did not look confident in net. Buffalo has a very strong team this year, and they played a stronger lineup so it’s not too surprisingly we lost; but hopefully we’ll get our act together and be more competitive by the regular season.
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