I must have asked it a hundred times over the course of three periods. 

“Why aren’t there more people here?” I’d say, hands upraised in wonder, head spinning to behold all the empty seats around me. 

On The Colisée ice, where the Maine Nordiques perform their magic, an early game brawl was just concluding and the scrapper from the other team was taunting the crowd on his way to the penalty box. 

Whoops, strike that. The scrapper was given a game misconduct, so off he went, all red-faced and scowling back to the locker room as boos and hisses rained down upon his sweaty head. 

That’s good fun right there.

A few minutes later, the Nordiques’ Tomek Haula performed a bit of that aforementioned magic, slipping the puck into the Northeast General’s net to open the scoring. 

The Colisée horn roared in celebration. Lights flashed on the overhead scoreboard and the crowd went wild! 

What crowd there was, anyway. If I remember right, roughly 1,600 souls came out to see the Nordiques play on that Friday night, which sounds pretty good until you realize that The Colisée seating capacity for hockey is close to 4,000. 

So, I’ll ask you one more time, friend, and maybe you can find me an answer this time. 

Why aren’t there more people here? 

Tickets for the Nordiques’ regular season games cost a measly 10 bucks. If you were such a skinflint that you didn’t want to pay even that, you could score free tickets to any of the games at Roopers. 

Imagine that: free admission to some of the best hockey you will see at any level. In a city like Lewiston, which was once known as Hockey Town, you’d expect to see so many people cramming into The Colisée that some of them would have to sit in the rafters. 

That’s the way it used to be, you know. 

John Frechette, a hockey fan who still tends goal in a men’s league, bless his puck-bruised heart, remembers when so many fans crammed into the arena that some had to sit on the the stairs. 

Police were always coming by and shooing them away, Frechette recalls, but since there were no free seats, they’d just have to sneak off to another part of the arena and watch from whatever bit of free space they could find.

“I miss the old days of a full barn,” he says. 

Of course he says that. Anybody who loves the sport knows that hockey is best when the arena is jam packed with thousands of foot-stomping, fist-pumping, referee-berating fans who will spend most of the game on their feet so they don’t miss a single bone-shuddering check or a sweet wrist shot through the five hole. 

Hockey isn’t just to be watched. It’s to be experienced. And to me, junior hockey is about as good as it gets. The talent on the ice is unbelievable. You’ve got young legs and fast-beating hearts full of desire and ambition. These guys, not far out of high school, live for hockey and have giddy dreams of NHL glory. For three periods, they give it their all, and the entertainment value for anyone lucky enough to be there is through the roof. 

And yet…  

This past Saturday night, the Nordiques hosted the New Hampshire Mountain Kings at The Colisée as the regular season came to a close. Admission to the game was free. That’s free as in zero dollars — one could take his whole family to the game and it wouldn’t cost him a cent, unless he wanted to spring for beer and pretzels. 

Free hockey in Lewiston! You’d think The Colisée would have been busting at the seams, with so many rabid hockey fans trying to cram in that they would have taken to sitting on one another’s laps, if that’s what it took. 

The final attendance tally of that game? 1,289. Not even half the seats available had butts in them.

Dear Lewiston, what has happened to your hockey soul?

When I played hockey as a kid in Waterville, we always dreaded coming to this city. The kids in Lewiston always seemed to be three feet taller than us and they were five times as mean.

In Lewiston, even at the youth hockey level, fans would stand right up against the boards, pounding on the glass and heckling us wee folk from Waterville as we tried to get through three periods without broken limbs. 

“Lewiston is a real hockey town,” our coaches would tell us, as we dabbed at bleeding faces and tended to various bruises and contusions in the locker room. 

Back then, everybody spoke of hockey in Lewiston with such awe. We were told tales of children born with skates already on their feet who, once freed from the womb, would then spend every winter hour playing hockey on frozen ponds, lakes or puddles to hone their skills.  

Those kids ate special diets that made them huge and yet they were still blazing fast when their blades hit the ice. Every game I ever played in Lewiston ended in double digit defeat and we felt lucky just to have survived those games at all. 

“Yep,” the ER doctor would say as he looked us over. “Lewiston is a real hockey town.” 

But, I’m sorry. If you can’t fill half an arena for junior hockey even when tickets are given away, you don’t get to wear that moniker anymore. Old-timers can still tell their tales of Lewiston’s golden age for hockey, but the people of this age have no claim to those stories any more. 

Because it irks me so, I contacted Justin Pelletier, a former Sun Journal sports reporter who is about as close as you will ever get to a hometown hockey expert. 

Every time Lewiston gets a new hockey team, Pelletier explained, locals tend to go on about how great Lewiston hockey was in the past rather than embrace what’s right in front of them. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. 

“Everyone always wants to compare,” he says, “rather than take things for what they are.” 

There are also changing demographics at play, Pelletier continues, and the constant allure of other things to do — who wants to go out on a cold night to watch live hockey when he’s got 300 satellite channels on TV, a hundred games on his phone and no end to high-definition movies to stream on Netflix, am I right? 

Whatever caused it, Lewiston relinquished its Hockey Town title and it’s too bad, because a reputation for hockey enthusiasm would be much more desirable than the reputation we’ve presently got.  

And now the Nordiques are going to the playoffs. In another time, this would be the news of the year. It’s all that people would be talking about in the bars. Kids would count down the days until game one on their calendars. Tickets would become so precious, you’d find scalpers in long overcoats working The Colisée parking lot.  

We may not see any of that come Friday when the Nordiques take on the New Hampshire Mountain Kings for game one, but it would be really swell if the city could muster some of its old hockey spirit and return to The Colisée in respectable numbers. 

This may not be a true hockey town anymore, but if you’ve lived here a while, it’s in your DNA, and you should understand that it’s just not natural for there to be empty seats in a Lewiston arena where semi-pros are going at it full tilt for our entertainment.

So, I’ll see you Friday night, then?

Good deal. I can practically guarantee that you won’t have this much fun for 10 bucks anywhere else.