Best/Favorite Cheers

[Jim Hyla]

[quote Robb]I always remember fondly '97 Lake Placid.  Vermont had been heavily favored to win the league (Perrin & St. Louis's senior year), but they couldn't pull it together, finished 3rd, and lost their QF series at home to Princeton.  Many UVM fans had already bought tickets to Lake Placid, and were there making a nuisance of themselves.  One guy in particular ("The Fat Guy Sucks!") directed so much vitriol at the Cornell fans that he got himself kicked out of the arena.

But I digress.  Anyway, there was enough bad blood going that Cornell fans started a "Where is Vermont?" cheer and, even better, as Clarkson was destroying Princeton 5-1, "Princeton beat Vermont!"

You just have to love using one team's misfortune against another to bludgeon yet a third team...:-D[/quote]Thanks for reminding me, it was classic.

[Scersk '97]

Oh, there was a great amount of hate directed towards Vermont in the 1996 and 1997 seasons, both because of Tim Thomas's generally annoying arrogance and the Catamount fans' dogged representation of the underclass of ECAC hockey fandom.  Their cowbell, married to the "Go, Cats, go!"; their pathetic amplified band; the beer guts and woodchuck behavior:  everything brought the hate.  Vermont fans seemed to think that those two seasons were going to be their "party time," and there was nothing better than seeing UVM fall flat on its tiny-little-midget rumps.

For details, see http://www.amurgsval.org/squishy/placid.5.9.html#round1, for JTW's report on the finals that year.  I remember a "con-so-la-tion" chant directed towards the Vermont fans after the first game as well.  It's always been one of my favorites, but "Which team is the third place team?" has to take the blue ribbon for sheer cruelty.  I like cruel cheers.

One of the great disappointments of my hockey-watching life was the loss to Lake State in '96, robbing us of the opportunity to shut the Vermont fans up for good and make the Frozen Four.  I firmly, firmly believe that we would have one that sadly unplayed game.

p.s.  I have to attach a belated, hearty second for the sequence of "Long ride home!" with either "We get to leave!" or "You have to stay!"