It’s easy for a special event to feel gimmicky and nearly impossible to make it feel authentic, but hockey pulls it off every year by leaning into nostalgia and making it must-see TV.
Few things in sports today are universally liked, let alone loved. The NHL’s annual Winter Classic has become the rare exception.
With snow on the field and the Green Monster as a backdrop, fans were treated to 60 minutes of hockey as it was originally played: on an outdoor sheet of ice, in the daytime, free from most digital trappings of the modern indoor game. As a visual spectacle, the Winter Classic is a high-budget, unscripted period piece.
The promotion flopped for a simple reason: sports serve to remind adults of an earlier time in their own lives, if not the lives of their parents and grandparents. Turning ahead the clock does nothing to reinforce our place in a world that predates our working memory. Turning back the clock, when executed well, makes us all warm and fuzzy inside. The Winter Classic finds a new and fun way to execute that every year.
By the time of the first Winter Classic, in 2008, outdoor rink-building technology was good enough that buy-in from players and coaches was relatively easy. Rotating the game among the most hospitable outdoor climates helps make this a non-issue.As a business venture, the game has to be must-see TV in order for the league to sell it to networks, who in turn sell commercial air time to advertisers.
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