“The Loudest Building I Ever Played In”: The Utah Hockey Club's Memorable Debut

SALT LAKE CITY – “Off to Utah!”

A unique voice screamed the familiar chant moments after the puck dropped at the Utah Hockey Club's opening game Tuesday.

“Let’s go to Utah!”

The chant slowly picked up momentum, spreading from section to section of the Delta Center.

“Let’s go to Utah.”

Soon the organic call echoed throughout the area, drowning out the sounds of skates on ice and sticks on pucks.

“That was the loudest building I’ve ever played in,” Logan Cooley said after Utah’s 5-2 win over the Chicago Blackhawks. “It was special.”

The NHL came to Utah with a lot of pomp and spectacle. ESPN broadcast a live broadcast from outside the arena – about 10 hours long; there was a free concert in the square – by the artist with the No. 1 song in America; and the players strolled across a blue carpet surrounded by hundreds — perhaps thousands — of fans to enter the arena.

Oh, and there was the game.

Towels blew, chants rang out and fans spent hundreds of dollars hoping for an unforgettable evening. It didn’t take long for the Utah Hockey Club to deliver.

Dylan Guenther scored with a masterful one-time shot less than five minutes into the game, and Clayton Keller followed suit later in the first half. This is how thousands and thousands of die-hard fans were born. Salt Lake City had become a hockey town.

“It was a hell of a journey. Every step was great,” said head coach Andre Tourigny. “Hearing the crowd at the start of the game, the presentation from the players, when we scored our first goal and when things got a little bumpy, it was just phenomenal.”

If Tourigny wanted to remember the magnitude of this game, all he had to do was look at his phone. Half of the league's coaches texted him Tuesday about the historic contest; that didn't normally happen.

“I didn’t get any texts from the head coaches last year, you know what I mean?,” he said. “And I didn’t text any other head coaches either. This is something special.”

When Guenther scored his second goal of the night with less than a minute to play to seal Utah's first win, the crowd went wild. Towels blew, people hugged and fans screamed with joy.

In the grand scheme of things, it's just one game in 82, but everyone knows Tuesday night's game will last that long…maybe forever.

“The building has erupted and we’re seeing the towels disappear,” goalkeeper Connor Ingram said. “I think that's why each of us came to the game of hockey – this very moment, this noise. That’s what wakes you up every morning.”

Yes, the game was the grand finale to a special day in Utah, but it was also a great start.

The game was the beginning of a journey for a team that had fallen by the wayside for so long. They stuck together during the tumultuous years in Arizona, where they played in a college arena in hopes of finding a permanent home.

It was clear they had found one on Tuesday.

Tourginy is not the reflective type. There will be a day – maybe years later, maybe sooner – when he will sit down and allow himself to think about everything that has happened in the last six months or more. He will think about the pain of leaving Arizona and the joy of finding safer footing in Utah.

But for now there is still a job to be done. There's a long flight to New York on Wednesday to worry about and a week-long road trip to prepare for; and ensuring that moments like what happened on Tuesday are not isolated incidents.

“Here’s my brain,” he said. “I don't look back much other than, 'Okay, what can we do better and stuff like that.' I'm not the type of person to think too much about what happened in the last six months.

So what will he remember on Tuesday?

“We won,” he said. “That’s what I’ll remember.”

Everyone else will do it too.