What you mean "WE"? (lol)
Became a fan of Ranger hockey on the radio in 1953. Went to my first game in 1956, the day Connie Mack passed away. Attended many games in the 60's and 70's, even had season tickets through the late 70's. With the coming of cable TV in Manhattan, followed it through the 80's. The strike near the end of the 91-92 season ended my love affair with the NY Rangers and the NHL. When the Rangers won the Cup in 94, I didn't even bother to watch the third period.....I just didn't care anymore.
>>The strike near the end of the 91-92 season ended my love affair with the NY Rangers and the NHL.
That’s too bad. I stopped watching for a long while after the NHL moved my team to Carolina. I’m a bit younger, started watching WHA in the early 70s when I was a kid and kept up with the Whalers till they left in 1997. Then hockey was dead to me for ~6 years, but I started watching again in California (of all places) and started playing in adult leagues.
My experience is roughly parallel. I'm pretty sure my father took me to my first Ranger game in '53 or so. (I was seven years old.) We would go to four or five games a year. I even had a couple of my birthday parties at the Garden. Once I was old enough to go into the city (from LI) by myself (11 or 12 years old) I started going to games with my friends too. Sometimes we would use our G.O. cards to get fifty cent admission to the upstairs side arena (where you could only see from the first row - behind that you only could see about two thirds of the ice).
I figured out when tickets would go on sale, and would go into NYC when sales would open up so I could virtually select my seats: usually Side Promenade, Section S, Row A, Seats 1 & 2, right up against the glass next to the visitors bench. Sometimes Bill Cullen beat me to those seats! And they were really next to the visitor's bench. There was no separation at all. I loved the old Garden. I can still see everything about it in my mind's eye.
When I was in college, and almost commuting between Troy, NY, and NYC, the "new" Garden opened. My father got season tickets, first in 305 in the green, and then 101 in the orange, to entice me to come back to NYC even more often. (By then my parents had moved to Manhattan.) I continued to attend about 30 games a year from Troy, and then from Hartford where I landed my first job out of college.
But then things went south. I don't know if it was Vic Hadfield laughing in the penalty box as the Rangers were losing the Stanley Cup Finals or Brad Park tripping over the blue line on a regular basis, but I started to realize that I was watching other people work, and paying to do it too. Brad Park never came to watch me write computer programs. I cared more about the games than the players did. It was just stupid.
So I stopped going.
I still love hockey. I think it's a great game, and it's great to watch when the players play with the enthusiasm of eight year-olds. College games are like that. Maybe the last two rounds of the Stanley Cup Playoffs are like that too, Vic Hadfield notwithstanding. And for some reason the outdoor New Year's game is too. I see this year the Rangers will be playing the Flyers down in Philly on January 2nd. Maybe I'll go.
ML/NJ