In its purest form, outdoor hockey is not a game.
A score might be kept. The fundamentals of the sport are still in place.
You skate. You deke. You pass. You shoot. You score.
But outdoor hockey is not about having more goals after 60 minutes. Rarely is time kept. More often, time is forgotten. Wins and losses, what usually matter above all, fade away.
Instead, outdoor hockey is about the anticipation of the cold and the celebration of just that.
For the first time ever, Penn State’s hockey teams will play games inside of Beaver Stadium on an outdoor rink.
It will be the biggest celebration of Penn State hockey. This is the sporting event Penn State fans have been waiting for.
Yes, Penn State fans have been searching for a football national championship since 1986. And the hunt for a basketball team that is functional certainly hasn’t yielded much in the way of results, especially recently. But unlike those searches, Penn State has patiently been waiting for what it is about to see this weekend.
Patience is, after all, the most essential ingredient in playing the sport of ice hockey outside.
Summer has to turn into fall. Fall – when the regular season starts – has to reluctantly give way to winter. And winter has to bring the cold. Very rarely in that process do people find a reason to anticipate winter. It’s painful. It’s unkind. It’s harsh. Everything that was bright is suddenly dark.
But if you own a pair of skates, a stick, some gloves and maybe a jersey, there is a glimmer of light found from the sun reflecting off of a nearby pond or in your backyard.
It’s that wait — and the patience required — that makes the experience so pure.
Talk to any hockey player – regardless of skill or age. Ask them about their favorite memories of the sport. They may mention a championship game. Or scoring a big goal. But eventually, they’ll find their way to telling you about skating outside. They’ll easily recount passing the puck with their friends on a pond. They’ll paint you a detailed tapestry of a cobbled-together rink held in place by some scrap wood, lined with a tarp and frozen from water out of the hose, all of which combined to create, to them, something that felt bigger than any arena or barn.
In the same way water out of that hose bib a few months prior is the most refreshing taste on a hot day, the cold air rushing past your face while skates crunch on ice that started from the same hose is the most refreshing feeling. They will tell you just that.
It’s a feeling that can’t be found inside, even in the game’s coldest rinks. It has to live outside, where and when nothing else is alive – except for the present moment of outdoor hockey.
It’s those differences that make it so dearly cherished. Hockey in an arena with plexiglass and bright lights and a gigantic jumbotron is not the same as outdoor hockey. Games played indoors happen with too much frequency to only occasionally be remembered. The sport played outside is a rarity that is embraced forever.
Inside, it’s loud. Outside, it’s not. The cold air and the falling snow steal the noise. That unique dissipation of sound only intensifies the feelings.
Inside, it’s fast. Outside, it’s not. The only thing speeding it up is the sun’s shorter days. And the memories of those days – which if you’re lucky enough to have some headlights or backyard lights can be extended even longer – remain forever.
When that rink is, however, constructed in the middle of a football stadium using a more sophisticated technology but with the same guiding principles as a backyard rink, all of that noise and all that speed find a different tune and a different pace that is the perfect collision of what makes the game and the sport of hockey so great.
There has never been an event like the one Penn State is about to experience inside the coliseum located on the corner of Curtin and Porter.
But that pace that only outdoor hockey can bring has patiently bound Penn State into waiting, not searching, with confidence that one day this would happen.
Even when Penn State’s hockey teams played under yellow lights – a stone’s throw from its current residence – this was a question.
“When will Penn State play a game inside Beaver Stadium?”
In that structure of the question, it was never a doubt — only a guarantee.
The venue, usually and almost exclusively reserved for gatherings of 107,000-plus people to celebrate, to yell, to experience pain that only college football can bring, has always been the promise inside of Penn State’s hockey dreams.
It was always a “when” and never an “if” that Penn State would one day have varsity hockey, at least permanently, too. It was that same confidence that helped turn those club dreams and their “if” to a Division I “when.” When that happened in 2012, the initial question never stopped. It only got louder in an unrelenting fashion akin to when Penn State’s defense steps onto the field on Saturdays in the fall.
After last season’s mad dash to a Frozen Four, which started with an outdoor game in Chicago, the ask felt more possible and more frequently asked because of the newfound attention. It then got even faster and louder when the player that will be the program’s most recognizable showed up in 2025.
All along, people have never stopped waiting. Fans have never stopped pondering what it would look like when a slab of ice roughly one-third the size of a football field was placed on the football field which has been the community’s gathering point for the last 65-or-so years. Everyone – and anyone – headed to Beaver Stadium this weekend, or anyone who ever allowed their head to go to envisioning hockey inside Beaver Stadium, knows that just like those moments on the pond or in the backyard aren’t forgotten about – neither would those moments inside the stadium.
The score wouldn’t matter. The memories will.
All the while, that’s what people have been anticipating. That’s what they’ve been yearning to celebrate — a sport they love with the place and the school they love. What that moment might feel like in a place that holds so many memories and so much meaning.
But in the way you have to wait for fall to become winter, for the temperature to be cold enough for water to freeze, all so that you can celebrate hockey at its purest form, you have to be patient for the moment.
It takes time.
But now, the waiting is over. The patience has paid off.
It finally is time.
Outdoor hockey inside of Beaver Stadium is here.
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