Beaver Stadium has roared before.
Usually, when Beaver Stadium comes alive with noise, it does not happen instantaneously. It begins in a pocket – in front of the play or as one develops and in a manner of nanoseconds that sound spreads from section to section, from seat to seat.
Row by row, each fan – assuming their cheering for the blue and white – makes the avalanche of sound that cascades throughout the third-largest outdoor stadium in the world. It’s fast. If your ear is not trained to – or used to it – you might not notice it. But little by little, it spreads.
This was different.
Thirteen seconds into the second period of a hockey game being played on the same plain that’s hosted more than 400 football games, Penn State’s Aiden Fink shot the puck into the back of a net in the south end zone. He lifted his hands into the air, but this time, instead of that roar rolling down the grey bleachers and around the bowl, it roared at once.
In an instant, 74,575 voices exploded into jubilation. There was no delay. There was no virality. There was only a moment of unison that the soon-to-be 66-year-old stadium has certainly never heard before.
Penn State has never experienced what it was in that moment it had just experienced. Penn State will never experience what could have been had it found a way to win in overtime.
But even in a 5-4 overtime loss, Penn State men’s hockey found a way to change how a state and its school looks at hockey that will impact it forever.
Hours before Fink scored the first of two goals on the afternoon, Penn State fans flowed into the parking lots, packed with the essentials. There was cold weather gear to face the brunt of the 16-degree weather, of course. But there was beer. There was food. Tailgate chairs. Tables. Grills. Tents. The very things that provide the creature comforts of a Saturday in the fall.
These are things that need planning and care – things that are brought with intention. And even in that 16-degree grey-skied weather, they were put to good use.
The tailgate scene felt hardly different than any other fall Saturday. Music from one canopy wrapped in a tarp collided to hold warmth with another speaker’s sounds. Food was shared quickly, too, as the air made it cold fast.
But if you looked around just long enough, the flags far more often said “Penn State Hockey” instead of “Penn State Football.” Kids, usually wearing the jersey of names like Barkley or Allar, weren’t flinging footballs through sky while another was running a route to catch a touchdown pass. Instead, they were wearing No. 72 jerseys with “McKenna” on the back while they smacked hockey sticks off of the heavily salted concrete to pass a puck across the lots.
These were subtle differences. They were subtle reminders that today – unlike the 412 other times – was different.
What Penn State was about to see once it scanned its tickets and found its way through the maze of people instead was a hockey rink, not a football field before them inside of the stadium.
As zambonis completed their final laps of the ice – encircled with the week’s snow – familiar tunes rang out. The Blue Band, perched in its usual corner, played on. The student section that wrapped around them pulsated white pom-poms as it has done for decades now.
Little by little – the seats that were available filled in. If you focused in on them, not the main attraction, it felt normal. It felt like it was late November, not late January.
But when you moved your head back to the show – a 200-by-85 foot slab of ice centered on the 50-yard line – you were quickly reminded that this was not the usual reason to enter one of the world’s biggest stadiums.
Years before Fink scored the goal into the second period – now even decades before that – this had been the dream.
The idea of hockey inside of Beaver Stadium was an obvious fit in that University Park is almost always frustratingly cold at this time of year. But frustratingly for some, the sport of hockey was not taken seriously – at least fiscally enough – to support that obvious fit.
The pipe dream of an NHL game was the only reality for a while – even if the pipes needed winterizing first.
But when the club team moved up to the Division I level about 14 years ago – when Fink wasn’t even 10 – the idea of hockey inside of Beaver Stadium felt all the more possible.
However, the state – or rather the fanbase that is spread even beyond the commonwealth – would need to take the sport just a bit more seriously. In Pennsylvania, football is king. In the eastern half of the state, the baseball is taken intensely, too.
Hockey has always just been this other thing. Occasionally the Penguins would catch fire with some regular success. And the Flyers, often more losers than not, would be a bridge between football and baseball season in Philly.
But nothing unites the state and its deep passion for sports like Penn State – and in particular Penn State football. Every home football Saturday in the fall, State College becomes the third-largest city in PA. Every away football Saturday in the fall, most bars become the busiest place in PA.
For that hockey team though, it was looked at more of a novelty in a lot of ways in a broader sense than the sport itself. People knew the head coach. People knew the building was new – even as it turned a decade old. People knew there was a program now. They knew this was a thing Penn State had. They knew it was a part of place so many so deeply care about.
But last year, something changed. People – who hadn’t necessarily dreamt of hockey inside of Beaver Stadium – started to pay more attention to Penn State men’s hockey team. Aided by a Frozen Four run, attention and expectations were put on the program for the first time. Then, when Penn State received a commitment from likely-No. 1 NHL draft pick Gavin McKenna, a player most people probably had never heard of but also understood the magnitude of, hockey took another step.
That’s why it seemed that this was the perfect opportunity for this moment – an outdoor hockey game inside of Beaver Stadium.
And this fanbase was ready for that goal 13 seconds into the second period.
The pop of sound after Fink’s goal was not like what is usually heard on Saturday afternoons inside Beaver Stadium. The roar was simultaneous – much in the way over at Pegula Ice Arena, it’s also simultaneous. In the way the usual elements were there but with some slight variations to any gameday in and around Beaver Stadium, the usual roar was loud too. But the roar, produced by the second-largest crowd to ever watch a college hockey game, didn’t roll. It only came and remained.
In the back-and-forth fashion against Michigan State, the bursts of noise exploded like the usual fireworks off the top of the suites on the west stanchion. But they weren’t celebrating touchdowns. They were celebrating goals.
The usual was ever-so-slightly different enough when you looked closer at this version of gameday inside Beaver Stadium to feel that difference.
Even when Michigan State’s Charlie Stramel scored in overtime, the usual disappointment of a loss unusually dissipated. Left in its way, only appreciation.
We will never know what that sound would have been like had Fink or McKenna or anyone else wearing a blue sweater found the back of the net before Stramel. What could have been wasn’t stolen by the hockey gods but rather a turnover and slick shot over the shoulder of Kevin Reidler. What could have been if Penn State won instead became part of an unusual hangover, one that was quickly cured by what was. One stung immediately but will be worth it in the long term.
Saturday was a monumental moment for the sport of hockey in the state of Pennsylvania brought by a monumental day from the Penn State men’s team. People from everywhere in the state embraced hockey with a warmth that can usually only be found on Saturdays in the fall. Something that until Saturday only Penn State football, not Penn State hockey, can do.
It was heard and felt when Fink scored the goal.
That momentum generated from that roar will roll throughout the state — in memories, pictures and stories, in bars and rinks, in youth locker rooms and in beer league postgame celebrations. It will carry over into Friday and Saturday nights spent cooped up, looking for something to watch. It will roar on into those kids who ask their parents to let them play. It will roar on as those parents tie their skates. It will roar on when the diehards look back at how spectacular Saturday’s spectacle was.
All because of Saturday and the roar that hockey brought to Beaver Stadium and that Beaver Stadium brought to hockey.
That roar, much like the one that spreads around during a football game, created by Fink’s goal, by the feeling of Saturday and by the appreciation for Penn State and hockey is something Beaver Stadium has never done before.
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