San Diego Gulls vs. Tucson Roadrunners — Sunday at Pechanga

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The Sunday between Christmas and New Year's is the flattest day of the year. Everybody is home, nobody has plans, and the default is another afternoon of the same television. A five o'clock puck drop rescues it for the price of a movie ticket. Pechanga Arena in that dead week fills with families who have run out of things to do with visiting relatives, which makes for a forgiving, cheerful, slightly chaotic crowd — the opposite of the tense building a playoff race produces. Tucson visits for the second time in a month, and the Gulls will have scores to settle from it. Worth knowing: the arena is a genuinely old building, concrete and loud, and the upper seats have a better view of the full ice than the expensive ones do. Concessions are the old-fashioned kind rather than a curated food hall, and in that week of leftovers a plain arena hot dog is oddly the correct meal. Five o'clock, Sunday the twenty-seventh, Sports Arena Boulevard.