Honk if you’re hot! Canes tailgaters shrug off the inferno outside before the big game.
The air outside PNC Arena on Friday afternoon felt like a sweat-soaked jersey, and the smoke from 100 Hibachis formed shadows on the 100-degree pavement as the first wave of tailgaters arrived, toting coolers full of Fireball slushies.
They plugged oscillating fans into pickup trucks, hung box fans from the ceilings of their party tents, sat back in their rocking camp chairs and rubbed cold Bud bottles on their cheeks.
With the Carolina Hurricanes in the Stanley Cup playoffs, it doesn’t matter that the plastic wheels on their Hibachis started to warp on the hot blacktop.
It didn’t matter that the only shade to be found three hours before the puck dropped came from the trunk of a dead tree.
Everything but a kiddie pool
There were Tiki bars to construct, cornhole boards to measure, miniature Stanley Cup statues to build out of coffee cans. Fans this avid will bring every comfort but a kiddie pool.
“We were gonna bring one,” explained Emil Branas, beverage in hand. “But then we thought, ‘How do you get water into it?’”
For a sport played on a sheet of ice, Friday’s pre-game ritual felt uncommonly sultry.
Paul Lawson arrived in a pair of kilts.
“Being Scottish, I have the right,” he said. “It’s kind of nice when the little breeze blows up there.”
Austin Carroll and friends played beer pong using cups filled with water — not beer.
“Don’t want the beer getting warm,” he said.
The toughest crowd came at 4 p.m., when the National Weather Service clocked the heat at 94 degrees. They found the few shady spots, knowing the rookies would be stuck in the unshaded wasteland in the parking lots center, where Canes flags dangled from hockey sticks, waiting for something to make them wave.
‘We’ve been doing this awhile’
They knew to make slushies out of not just bourbon, but green tea, or a fruit basket. Any foodstuff that had once been a mammal ended up charred and smoking on a paper plate.
“We’ve been doing this awhile,” boasted Patrick Drollinger, a tailgater for the past 22 years who grew a prospector beard for the Canes 2006 championship.
Heat? “That’s what the Conviction is for,” he said, motioning to a half-empty bottle of brown liquid.
Canes fervor swelled so deep in these tailgaters they hardly noticed they were sweltering.
And like any loyal fan, they cherished any good omen — on or off the ice.
“There’s a breeze!” Drollinger announced. “See? There it is now.”