Adam Hall remembers the feeling like it was yesterday.<\/p>\n
The date was Oct. 6, 2001.<\/p>\n
Hall, then a college hockey player at Michigan State University, was donned in full gear with added eye black on his face as he hiked with his teammates toward a game that would change hockey forever.<\/p>\n
Hall wasn\u2019t at his team\u2019s usual arena. Rather, he was gearing up for the game sometimes referred to as the \u2018Cold War\u2019 at the university\u2019s football stadium\u2014the first regular season outdoor hockey game held in North America.<\/p>\n
The NHL followed suit with their first outdoor regular season game, the 2003 Heritage Classic in Canada, and those outdoor games haven\u2019t stopped since.<\/p>\n
The league\u2019s next scheduled visit is to none other than Tampa, Florida\u2014the same city in which Hall played four NHL seasons\u2014on Feb. 1 to host the 2026 Navy Federal Credit Union Stadium Series.<\/p>\n
The experience is one-of-a-kind, and it still stands out among Hall\u2019s hockey memories.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt’s like this distant roar when you’re inside the tunnel, and then as you walk out of that tunnel, the roar surrounds you, gets louder and louder and it just opens up all around you. I mean, it\u2019s four times the amount of fans, and I still get chills thinking about seeing the distant fans in the far endzone in the tunnel and as you walk out having it open up around you.\u201d<\/p>\n
That game was an NCAA rivalry matchup between Michigan State and Michigan on a day nearly 75,000 fans sold out the stadium. Hall opened the scoring 3:25 into the game with a power-play goal and then had the primary assist on the game-tying goal in the final minute of what ended as a 3-3 tie between the in-state rivals.<\/p>\n
It wasn\u2019t his only outdoor game, as he also played for the Pittsburgh Penguins in the NHL\u2019s first-ever Winter Classic in 2008. The historic event saw the Penguins defeat the Buffalo Sabres 2-1 in a shootout on a blustery, snow-filled day in New York.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don’t think you could have scripted a better scene where it was just this continuous kind of Christmas snow,\u201d he said. \u201cIt was just heavy nonstop snow. I remember the ice and trying to stickhandle through piles of snow, and to try to make a pass across the ice you’d almost have to take a slapshot and fire it as hard as you could.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Adam Hall remembers the feeling like it was yesterday. The date was Oct. 6, 2001. Hall, then a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":131575,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[135,137,136],"class_list":["post-131574","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tampa","tag-tampa","tag-tampa-headlines","tag-tampa-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131574","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=131574"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131574\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/131575"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=131574"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=131574"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=131574"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}