HAMMING IT UP: 'Ice Mite' Becomes College Reporter

One of the most rewarding parts of any Harvard hockey game is experiencing the crowd, whose volume and enthusiasm multiples greatly within the confines of the Bright Hockey Center. But look more closely, past the mixture of students, alumni, and band members, and you’ll find families in attendance with their hockey-obsessed children. Have you ever asked yourself what happens to those little kids in the stands waving Harvard pennants that usually only come out for Harvard-Yale? Well, the answer might surprise you. They grow up to cover men’s hockey for The Crimson, and yes, they even manage to get a column out of it.

I already know what you’re wondering, provided that you care about college hockey or have lived in New England. In a city that boasts perennial national contenders Boston University and Boston College, how can this young “Masshole” who otherwise roots for the Red Sox and Patriots actually root for the Crimson over the Eagles and the Terriers?

As luck would have it, all you need to do is skate on the ice in the Bright Hockey Center at a young enough age. For a first-grader playing one of his first inter-town games as a member of the Brookline Youth Hockey “mite division,” Harvard’s Bright Hockey Center was a big-time venue where good players competed and fans cheered them on. Compared to all my early-morning practices in rinks around the Boston suburbs, what bigger stage could I ask for? Probably only the Boston Garden.

As I grew up, kept playing hockey on my town team, and returned to watch Harvard with my parents and teammates, the university itself never entered my mind as place for serious academic study. To me, Harvard always stood for a hockey team whose players wore Latin writing on the front or their jerseys and had begun playing the game in a youth program like mine.

And so this family tradition continued every year at the Beanpot, an annual exhibition tournament with nothing but bragging rights as the best college hockey team in Boston on the line. As the BU Terriers kept dominating the tourney year after year, I still came back rooting for the underdog Crimson, even if it meant trying to play “spot the other handful of Harvard fans” or sitting next to the BU band and putting up with their seldom-witty chants and fight songs.

Now, with men’s hockey as my new beat, everything is coming around full circle. This was the arena where I first remember noticing how to play the game at a higher level, the arena where I waited with my friends for players to sign my program after the game.

Though I discovered my lack of skills in middle school after a few Canadian youth hockey teams ran up the score against us in one too many tournaments, writing sports now starts a new connection to the team.

Even though I’m now going to games for a different reason and lose the chance to cheer when I enter the press box, I still enjoy watching a Harvard sports team extending its influence into the community. As the price of professional sports tickets makes a family night out to cheer on the home team prohibitively expensive, I’m glad that college sports is there as alternative way to see sports at a high level.

Since the Crimson has appeared in the NCAA Tournament five times in the past six years, fans get to see high-quality talent on a consistent basis without their wallets taking a hit. Why shell out more than $100 for mediocre balcony seats to see the Boston Bruins lose another game, when about half that much money sits you and your whole family a few rows from the ice, where you can see players who skate hard on every play, where you can see the competitive intensity up close?

When young kids cheer for the Crimson, they are not rooting for roommates and friends but simply watching athletes excel. To anyone who aspires to be like them one day, just getting an autograph or seeing the Crimson pull out a last minute victory is a brush with excitement.

So even as I don my collared shirt and khaki pants to blend in with my fellow reporters this season, I’ll still be searching for those fans who might unwittingly grow up to be just like me.

—Staff writer Robert T. Hamlin can be reached at rhamlin@fas.harvard.edu.