The Queen of Country Pop deserved better…

PublishedOctober 23, 2025 12:00 PM EDT•UpdatedOctober 23, 2025 11:58 AM EDT

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There’s nothing better than some nice bright lights bouncing off the crisp white ice of an NHL rink. Unfortunately for the Calgary Flames and Montreal Canadiens, they were not afforded this luxury for part of their game on Wednesday night.

Everything has been going wrong for the Flames so far this season. They came into the night 1-5-1 after nearly making the playoffs last season.

On the other hand, things have gone pretty well for the Habs, and they rolled into the Scotiabank Saddledome.

But seeing as this one was in Calgary, it didn’t start smoothly. According to Sportsnet, the game was delayed for 10 minutes because the light above the ice wouldn’t turn on.

Which, for reasons you can probably surmise, is not ideal.

However, after that, officials decided to get the game underway despite the lighting issue.

Now, here’s what viewers saw on the broadcast.

That doesn’t look too bad, but here’s the thing: the crew at Sportsnet did a great job of adjusting their cameras so that viewers at home got a pretty decent picture.

But here’s what it looked like inside the arena.

At least the league tried to get the game underway. If they felt like it was bright enough for paying fans to have a good enough view of the action, and for players to be safe, then there’s no problem.

It goes without saying that firing vulcanized rubber around a rink in the dark is probably not a good idea.

An issue like this isn’t the end of the world, but there was one problem, and that was that there was Canadian royalty in the house for this game.

Alright, now this is unacceptable. 

When Shania Twain — probably the most famous Twain since Samuel Clemens, top three at least — someone should be going bulb by bulb to make sure each one is cranking out as much light as possible.

Those things should be borderline blinding with the Queen of Country Pop in attendance.

And things got worse. While Calgary managed to hang with Montreal for most of the night, the Habs won in overtime thanks to a Mike Matheson one-timer off a feed from stellar rookie Ivan Demidov.