How do you satisfy a 10-year-old girl’s blood lust? You take her to a hockey game.
The local minor-league hockey team—the Gwinnett Gladiators—had a Two-for-Tuesday promotion recently, with tickets, hot dogs and other goodies priced at two for one. I took the kids. The Glads were hosting the Wheeling Nailers.
The girl, having read somewhere that blood bounces when it hits the ice, was actively rooting for fights to test her theory. How she thought she’d be able to see drops of blood bounce off the ice from Row 17 I don’t know, but she was determined to see the experiment through.
She had ample opportunity to investigate her hypothesis, as Nailer and Gladiator players dropped their gloves and set to pugilistic endeavors three times during the game. The last bout was her best chance at finding an answer, but because the fisticuffs were all the way across the rink, the results were inconclusive. There was blood—a lot of it; what looked like a two-foot-wide stain in the ice after the fight was broken up—but too far away to see if any of it bounced.
The girl was philosophical about it, though, and realized that her vantage point wasn’t prime for the work she was doing. As we were walking out of the arena after the game—a victory for the home team in an overtime shootout—she asked to come back for another game. Only this time, “Dad, can we get better seats?”
The results of the girls's bouncing blood experiment were inconclusive, as the fight took place all the way across the rink. There was blood, but whether it bounced was uncertain.
