The debut of “Avalanche Storytime with Adrian”

I have 25 years’ worth of stories on the Avalanche, and so on occasion I’ll tell some here in what we’ll call “Avalanche Storytime with Adrian.” Catchy, right?

I have some mild sensitivity to the charge of “All Dater does is talk about the old days”, which I shouldn’t, because it’s not true. I’ll stack my story-for-story count on the current goings-on with the team against anyone. But, no, I don’t want to live in the past.

Yet, what a great past it is/was with the Avs, right? So, with the encouragement of you, the subscribers who said you want more of this kind of thing, here’s the first installment of “Avalanche Storytime with Adrian.”

This story has to do with that picture you see above, of Marc Crawford and Peter Forsberg, and also about the day on which I believe that picture was taken. These stories are for my paid subscribers, so here comes the paywall cutoff. I’d love to have you as a subscriber, and the link to do so is right on this screen.

So, I am reasonably sure that picture, taken by my former Denver Post colleague Jerry Cleveland, was on Oct. 3, 1995, up in Vail (notice the ski slope behind them). This would have been the day the Avs played a preseason game in Vail against the San Jose Sharks, at Dobson Arena.

This is the cover picture to the Oct. 6, 1995, special section previewing the Avs’ first season in Denver. I have it as part of the stacks of real newspaper clippings I have covering those years. The Avs that night would play their first real game ever, at home against Detroit.

The game in Vail was kind of primitive and cool. It’s a very small, homey rink, Dobson Arena, with only a few hundred “seats” to watch (mostly just benches). The press was seated in kind of a cool place – a makeshift platform right over the edge of the glass in the corner. I mean, right over the glass.

What I love about this front page is the sub-quote below the big one. “Denver gets one hell of a team.” Yeah, we sure did, didn’t we? Eight months later, that one hell of a team would be a Stanley Cup champion.

So, more about this day, Oct. 3, 1995: That’s the day the O.J. verdict came down. I found out listening to the radio, in a car back from Vail with Rick Sadowski of the Rocky Mountain News in the passenger seat and Angie Reese of the Gazette-Telegraph in the backseat. We were all up there covering that preseason game, which I believe the Avs won by some ridiculous score but can’t quite remember.

All the talk about the Avs and the coming season, among the three of us, soon became all about the verdict. I remember all of us being a little stunned by it, but I really wasn’t all that shocked. The whole thing was a circus from beginning to end.

I remember that there was quite a bit of back-and-forth with the Avs over getting that photo taken. Getting Forsberg to show up on time for anything was always a bit of a, uh, problem. But a great photo it turned out to be, eh? Look at that hair on Crawford! Look how young Foppa looks! Time flies…

If anyone out there has any pictures from that very game, I’d love to share them. That game is mostly a fog in my memory now.