New Jersey Devils 3, SC Bern 2 (OT)

I had never been to a sporting event in Europe. And I’d never seen a hockey arena with big standing-room-only sections just like a soccer stadium.

Throughout the game, and especially after SC Bern’s late goal to tie the score at 2, the arena was filled with the kind of singing and chanting that I’d only heard on soccer broadcasts before. Most of it came from the upper deck “seats” behind us. I have no idea what they were singing and my cell phone couldn’t really capture it, but it was awesome to hear and that’s all that matters.

Since its founding in 1931, Schlittschuh Club Bern (Ice-skating Club Bern) is 15-time champions of Switzerland’s National League (NL). It is the most attended hockey team in Europe, averaging over 16,000 spectators. Its upper-deck grandstand is the world’s largest within an arena, with a capacity of over 10,000 bench seats.

When we were making our hotel reservations, we had struggled to find an available hotel in Bern, the country’s capital. I knew that sometimes all its hotels would fill due to a special event.

So Cassie searched the city’s events calendar and found an NHL game was scheduled for one of the nights we wanted to be in Bern. But strangely, there was no ticket information anywhere. Not on the city’s website, not on PostFinance Arena’s site, not on either teams’ sites, and not on the NHL’s site.

We shrugged our shoulders, settled on a hotel further away from the train station, accepted it would be a longer walk than expected (in heavy rain, it turned out), and moved on to making the next hotel reservation. But we would keep an eye out for an ad or a billboard in Bern, anything showing a box office phone number.

And when we arrived there from Italy, and we couldn’t even find that, we got really curious. It felt like the local team was going to play against an NHL club inside a speakeasy, and we were in on the secret. And we wanted to be there when the game started.

The next morning we rode the tram for 10 exits to look for a ticket office at the arena, several hours before gametime. We wandered up to the arena without knowing where we were going. It was the back side, and there were workers loading the concession stands through the open garage doors. Beyond them, at one corner of the arena we saw a small separate building that looked like a ticket booth. But we couldn’t see its front side and the signs weren’t in English. We walked to it.

Its roll-up doors were rolled down. Ticketing was closed.

We had walked a lot already. We later learned that was because we had used the wrong tram exit.

I peeked around the corner of the arena for more doors. There was something about a third of the way down, it looked like an office door. I told Cassie it would be the last door I would try before giving up. It was our first morning in Switzerland and already we were tired and achy. And sniffly, after walking through the rain last night. We would be fighting off a cold for the rest of the trip.

The door opened when I pulled it, revealing a staircase. Cassie was hesitant to barge into the team offices upstairs, but I really didn’t want to leave empty-handed at that point. We asked for directions to the ticket office and explained we couldn’t find any ticket info anywhere.

“I have four tickets that came back from the NHL I can sell to you. Two are really good and two are on the upper level.”

That’s how we were able to go to the game. Months earlier, it had sold out within just a few days. We figured this was no time to be cheap, so our seats were great (8th row, between the blue lines).

And the game went to overtime.

New Jersey Devils 3, SC Bern 2 (OT)