B Devil’s Season Done, Sad but Not Surprised

The American Hockey League announced yesterday that they were canceling the remainder of the 2019-20 season. That means the Binghamton Devils will not play their final 14 regular-season games, six of which were to be played at the Floyd L Maine's Veterans Memorial Arena.

The NHL is having a hard enough time trying to get their season back up and running without worrying about the AHL as well. With all the work that will be going into the restart of the NHL season, can understand why the AHL had to shelf their season.

I actually work part-time for the Binghamton Devils. It started the first year the Binghamton Senators came to town. I was approached by the Senators to be the music person for the arena. I did just about every game for the first three years when I decided it was too much to do every single home game.

Since then, I have been the backup / fill in guy for the remainder of the Senators time in Binghamton, and I’ve been the fill in for the Binghamton Devils for the last three seasons. Over the last two years I would say I averaged doing the music at 10 games a season.

Even though the Devils had six home games left, I wasn't scheduled to do the music at any more games this season. However, I was looking forward to going to those six games with friends. We already had two games picked out that we had tickets for and we're planning on grabbing dinner before those games. The coronavirus put a kibosh on that.

Deep down I knew it was a long shot, but I was still hoping the remainder of thesSeason could have been salvaged so I could have enjoyed a couple of more games as a fan, not an employee.

Before the season was put on hold, the Devils were one of the hottest teams in the American Hockey League. There are playing great hockey, and with the playoffs right around the corner, we were all hoping they would be able to land a playoff spot. I guess we'll have to wait until next year to see what happens.

While I understand and agree with the health experts that mass gatherings could still be dangerous at this point, even if they were to play their games without fans, I still would have loved to have seen how far this Binghamton Devils team would have gone, clicking The way they were before their season came to a grinding halt.

I'm still holding out hope that the NHL will be able to finish this season at some point this summer.

[via: The AHL]