Las Vegas Golden Knights v Carolina Hurricanes @ PNC Arena

For Christmas we bought the boys tickets to their beloved Golden Knights, playing in Raleigh - it's as close as we can get.  And because it was Christmas, we went all out and bought seats in the 2nd row behind the Golden Knights bench.

Straight after school we left for Raleigh.  We are going to stay the night up here - and they get the next day off school - not a bad deal.  Once we had checked in it was out the door again and we headed to The Goat, a newly opened bar and grill for dinner.

PNC Arena is not much further down the road and when we got to our seats the boys were blown away.  Unfortunately, even covered head to toe in their Vegas gear, the boys couldn't get an acknowledgement from any of the players.  Regardless we settled in.  Screamed NIGHT during the national anthem, in response to the loud RED! the Hurricane fans shouted.  And enjoyed the closeness of the action.  Actually the seats aren't that great for watching the game, with a lot of obstructions in front of us.  There were quite a lot of Vegas fans there, more than I expected, but the overwhelming support came for the high-flying Hurricanes.  A good match up that the Canes scored first and then kept a good control of the game.  At 3-1 with 10 minutes left the Canes were cruising, but 2 goals within 5 minutes by Howden and Hague sent the game into overtime.  It only took 4 more minutes for the Canes to kill it, and within seconds the Vegas bench cleared and were gone before we could show our appreciation.

This is our first NHL game and we had a blast, especially the Vegas-born boys.  Though I'm still not sure of all the rules (even after half a dozen Checkers games).  We might have to make this a seasonal event and give the Golden Knights some support on the road.  We didn't get the result we wanted but a fun family Knight was had by all.

L&B in the Good Seats - Vegas Golden Knights v Carolina Hurricanes

Carolina Hurricanes 4: N. Niederreiter (25), V. Trocheck (26), S. Aho (49, 64) defeated Las Vegas Golden Knights 3: N. Patrick (39), B. Howden (54), N. Hague (58)

Crowd: 15,228