On Monday we watched the Men’s Canada-USA Curling game at the Olympic Curling Centre.  It was an intense game.

Of course, no curling blog post would be complete without a photo of the famous Norway curling pants. They have two different variations… these red ones and also the white ones with blue/red checkers. Awesome.

We had a blast. I honestly think that it’s almost more fun to watching curling live than hockey. *gasp* Yep, I said it.

It was great watching Kevin Martin and his team beat the US, especially after losing the hockey game the previous night to the US team.

Afterwards we headed over to the Hockey House where we spent the entire day with a group of 9 friends.

We managed to take tons of group photos, including this one with the hosts of the Hockey House. Awesome white suits. P.S. Check out my awesome 2010 commemorative hockey stick (I got it signed by a ton of people!)…

Cam Neely was also there… what a legend!

We spent most of the afternoon watching the on-stage entertainment and wandering around the pavilion taking photos of everything.

Oh, and lots of bubble hockey was played.

We made sure to get clappers, and took this group photo…

… which we loved so much that we got them made into 9 souvenir pins! Haha.

I loved getting a photo with the sexy Hockey House babes.

It was so much fun to watch the women’s Canada-Finland semifinal there… we won handily, but every goal was a huge celebration.

And the main event… we got to watch the Triple Gold Club celebration on stage. The Triple Gold Club presentation is for the 22 players who have achieved the three most important accomplishments in hockey… winning the Stanley Cup, winning Olympic gold, and winning the IIHF world championships. As you can imagine, this is an extremely prestigious award and very, very few players ever win this.

I love this photo of Vladislav Tretiak, Rene Fasel, and Gary Bettman. It’s kind of ominous… but cool. They did the presentation to all the players.

Peter Forsberg was there..

… and Alexander Mogilny…

And Joe Sakic!

Sakic is one of my faves. My old bedroom at home still has his posters plastered all over the place.

Rob Blake too..

Here’s Brendan Shanahan, Joe Sakic, and Rob Blake on stage.

Allan and I posed inside of the hockey mask…

At the end of the night, the band Five Alarm Funk took the stage and they seriously blew the roof off the place. They were a lot of run.

We made sure to take lots of photos with them when they came off the stage and partied with us.

DJ Skratch Bastid closed off the night and he was really good. He was great at reading the crowd and reacting accordingly.

The view of our group from the stage.

Yeah, we had a ridiculously good time.

I have been looking forward to this game for a LONG time. Although we didn’t win any tickets in the lottery, we wanted to make sure we made it out to a few Olympic events so we didn’t pass up this once in a lifetime event. Of course, the one event we REALLY wanted to make it to was Men’s Team Canada Hockey… and here we are.

We got fabulous seats at Canada Hockey Place (a.k.a GM Place) and were literally Row 2 right behind the broadcasters. We got all ready for the game… we had our two signs, our flag, our face tattoos, and of course our jerseys.

It was seriously crazy trying to get into the stadium. There was a huge lineup of people, but fortunately we were at the very front. They made people wait for 2 hours before they could get into the stadium as the USA-SUI game had finished and they needed to clear people out and clean up. It was a long wait, and I was quite afraid someone was going to get trampled… but security and the volunteers kept it under control. They even split the group into two groups as you can see in the photos here.

The crowd went absolutely WILD when Team Canada stepped onto the ice. People were beyond excited to see our Vancouver Canucks goaltender Robert Luongo get the nod to be the starting goalie for Team Canada today. He looked relaxed, confident, and made some amazing saves throughout the game.

Here’s a shot of our amazing coaching staff with Mike Babcock and Ken Hitchcock, and one of our goalies, Brodeur.

Norway played great… they were fast and had some great goaltending… but not enough to stop Canada.

Allan and I were super stoked to be there as you can see from our excited faces here.

Jerome Iginla was a big fan favourite… he played extremely well… hitting, checking, shooting, passing… he played with a lot of heart last night.

Sidney Crosby also had a great game and I was surprised and impressed to see how tough he was playing, and with a lot of jump. I have a lot more photos on my Flickr stream.

Wayne Gretzky got a huge cheer when they showed him on the big screen. He says he’ll be around watching the games as long as Team Canada is playing.

Also spotted, Donald Sutherland, the two female goalies from Team Canada Women’s, my coworkers watching from a box, and a hilarious sign.

Chris Pronger had a great game as well and played solid defence against Norway. He loves to patrol the blue line.

Canada put a lot of pucks in the net, but here’s another one… we ended up winning 8-0. Sid congratulates Iggy as he gets a Hat Trick! A lot of hats were thrown on the ice.

There was lots of celebrating throughout the night.

It was rad to see the CTV broadcast happening at the other end of the rink. They actually have a collapsible “stage” that pops up and folds down in one minute so that they don’t disturb the view of the fans.

And to cap off a perfect night, we ran into the Director of Snowboarding for Canada, Christian Hrab, outside BC Place. He was proud to see his team up on the podium, especially to see Mike Robertson get the Silver Medal for Canada. He gave us free tickets to see the Victory Ceremony that night! Thanks Christian! Thank you for being so generous… loving the Canadian spirit around the Olympics!

And yep, we ended up watching the Barenaked Ladies perform live at BC Place from fantastic floor seats. I’m a huge fan (I even have their Christmas album), and I teared up a few times listening to them play some of my favourites. Allan and I ended up singing the songs all the way home and cheering ourselves hoarse at all the fans out in the city downtown. It was an incredible night, and I couldn’t have asked for anything more.