Hurricanes, outdoor hockey deliver Raleigh one of its most memorable sporting nights

As Saturday afternoon turned to evening, the scene on the roads surrounding Carter-Finley Stadium resembled the one Tom Wolfe described in his famous 1965 Esquire story about attending a race at the venerable North Wilkesboro Speedway. Wolfe, in what’s widely considered one of the best magazine stories ever written, went on for several paragraphs describing the world’s biggest traffic jam on U.S. 421, the road filled with automobiles of all shapes and sizes and colors.

The idea was to capture the spectacle of a larger-than-life event, a southern NASCAR race, and how North Carolinians (and, yes, those scattered around nearby states) had been drawn by the pull of something bigger than themselves, or anything they’d usually experience. And so it was here on Saturday, where traffic was already backed up more than a mile around Carter-Finley Stadium more than six hours before it hosted an outdoor professional hockey game.

Just the sentence alone, to anyone who grew up around Raleigh or elsewhere in North Carolina, still takes a second or two to register. And that, despite the build-up, despite the years of anticipation for the NHL’s Stadium Series game between the Carolina Hurricanes and Washington Capitals. And so it bears repeating: traffic was already backed up more than a mile around Carter-Finley Stadium more than six hours before it hosted an outdoor professional hockey game.

Talk about spectacle. This wasn’t among the most important sporting events in Raleigh’s history. There were all those ACC basketball tournaments decades ago, after all, and no shortage of other college basketball games of great magnitude and even a college football game or two — despite N.C. State’s history of mediocrity — that were bigger. The Hurricanes, themselves, won the 2006 Stanley Cup just across the way from Carter-Finley, and played for another in 2002.

But in terms of sporting spectacles? In terms of an event that felt like a can’t-miss for the throngs of people who, in some cases, sat through traffic for hours, just to be among the 57,000 who packed this place to its limit? It’s difficult to think of another sporting event in Raleigh’s history that compares. A significant part of the reason is that this was much more than mere sports.

It was part rock concert, part college football game, part NASCAR race, part giant outdoor festival. And, oh yeah — there was the main event. The hockey. Undoubtedly, part of the appeal was the curiosity factor; the lure of what it’d be like to see what happens when a crew of about 200 workers builds an ice rink smack dab in the middle of a college football stadium and pumps in 20,000 gallons of water and mixes it (though not in a literal sense) with 3,000 gallons of glycol coolant. The result, it turns out, is pretty cool (pun unintended, if not unavoidable).

Who knew that a hockey rink could look so natural, at home, plopped down in the middle of Carter-Finley? Or that all that water and coolant, distributed over about 67 yards, is exactly what’s needed to create a layer of ice two inches thick? That’s what the Hurricanes and Capitals skated upon for about three hours Saturday night, when Carolina asserted itself during a dominant 4-1 victory.

For once, the result and the score were something of an afterthought. So was the lack of relative drama and competitiveness. This was the rare sporting event that exceeded its considerable hype before it even began, simply by existing and coming to fruition. It’d been a long time coming, in more ways than one.

To understand the entire significance of the spectacle is to understand the history behind it. The full history. It’s to go all the way back to the beginning. Earle Edwards, then the N.C. State football coach, thrust a shovel into the ground in December 1964 and dug a hole that in time turned into Carter-Finley Stadium — Carter Stadium, as it was known when it opened in 1966.

Before then, the land was nothing but woods and fields near the fairgrounds — a vast emptiness on the outskirts of town. The stadium was to be modest, even for mid-60s standards. The estimated cost was $2.5 million, a figure the NHL undoubtedly exceeded over the past week or so while it transformed a college football stadium into a professional hockey venue.

Back when Edwards first plunged that gold-tinted shovel into the Earth there was much anticipation. N.C. State used the groundbreaking as a way to raise money for the completion of the project. Bill Friday, then the president of the UNC System, described the groundbreaking as “a wonderful thing.”

“We have been waiting for this day a long time,” he said then, according to a Dec. 12, 1964 story in The News & Observer. “The stadium represents so many opportunities for the university and the city of Raleigh.”

Safe to say that hosting an outdoors professional hockey game wasn’t at the forefront of Friday’s mind when he considered the opportunities the stadium might one day present. When Carter-Finley opened, the NHL consisted of its Original Six franchises, and that was it. The southernmost played its home games in New York City’s Madison Square Garden.

The league doubled in ‘67, expanding to the West Coast and as far south as St. Louis. It was only the addition of another 20 franchises and the NHL’s gradual west and southward migration and another 50 years, give or take, before the fantasy of a night like Saturday began to feel like it might be possible. And then the Hurricanes and their supporters had to wait some more when this game, originally scheduled for 2021, was postponed at the height of the pandemic.

Finally the moment drew near. Everything about Saturday spoke to the magnitude of it. The traffic. The parking lots, full of tailgaters passing time before hockey as if it was instead a 3:30 p.m. Wolfpack football game in mid-October. The police escorts the teams received, showing up in buses.

A crowd several rows deep waited more than an hour for the Hurricanes to walk from PNC Arena toward Carter-Finley, with an escort from the N.C. State marching band. There was that band, bounding about throughout three periods Saturday night, with State’s mascots joining Stormy, their Hurricanes counterpart, to give things a collegiate feel.

“Listen, this is something special,” Rod Brind’Amour, the Hurricanes coach, said hours before his team’s victory. “I didn’t really start thinking about this until after our last game. (Friday) was kind of neat but it was rainy and it was a mess.”

And now, he said, “you see that walking in — that’s special. We’ve got to make them proud.”

They were proud. “They” being the folks in Hurricanes sweaters, at least.

There was a good amount wearing Capitals gear, too. It wasn’t until midway through the third period, and about 11 p.m., that Carter-Finley began to clear out a little. Even then, though, late on a Saturday night and in the midst of a game long decided, the majority of spectators stuck around. There was no beating traffic, anyway. And so they embraced the spectacle a while longer, and a night unlike any Raleigh had experienced, and even when it was over people lingered, taking it in.