Los Angeles Kings vs. Detroit Red Wings

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Half the concourse is wearing a hundred years of somebody else's history. Detroit supporters travel with a particular confidence - not arrogance exactly, more the settled calm of people whose team was winning things before this city had ice in it. The contrast is the whole attraction. One crowd carrying inherited tradition, one crowd that built its own from nothing in a desert, meeting on a Thursday in February with the season in its serious stretch. Get there early enough to read the sweaters properly. Half of them are older than the people wearing them and several carry names on the back that nobody under thirty in the building will recognise. It is a Thursday, which keeps the price sensible for a fixture with this much history attached, and the building empties fast enough afterwards that you are on the freeway inside twenty minutes. Either way, you leave having watched a game that nobody will replay and that was, for two and a half hours, the only thing happening.