I don’t really remember seeing the Odyssey Arena being built and I don’t overly remember much of their first half of the season which was played on the road due to the construction of the arena on-going, but I’m certain at the time I was aware and I do have vague memories of sitting in class at Bangor Tech sneaking a peak at how this new phenomenon to hit Northern Irish sport was getting on at yet another town in England for which they were calling a temporary home.

I know there was a lot of hoopla around the day they would finally play a game in the Odyssey Arena and a lot of anticipation at what kind of setting it would be. As much as I was counting my lucky stars that someone had decided to try a professional hockey team in Belfast given that I had taken to the NHL side of the sport just a year or two before, I was still unconvinced that it would actually work. The Ice Bowl had been around since the Irish famine and it had been hosting some form of hockey or another and I knew not many people, if any, ever went along to give it much of a look. So I was concerned that this sport I knew people would love if they gave it a chance would never get a chance from the people of the city who would see it as something so novel and alien that by the end of the year it would be nothing more than a bigger Ice Bowl on the edge of the Titanic Quarter.

I know I wasn’t alone in my skepticism. Most anyone I talked to was unsure it would work and felt the idea was daft from the get-go. But then, none of us had actually seen inside the arena nor seen the entertainment that the game would offer under the bright lights of this new arena and complex.

So it was only with a week to go, perhaps even less, when I decided I may get round to getting a ticket for what would be the Belfast Giants first ever game in Belfast. I wanted to be there to see it, see the arena and judge what it would be like. No doubt a ticket would be available, I mean there couldn’t have been more than a few hundred like me around the country that actually had a prior interest in the sport and then you might get a few more curious passers by thrown in. But if what I had heard was right that the arena sat 7,200 I’d have my pick of a seat.

Looking back at that attitude now seems laughable – but only with the power of hindsight. I didn’t expect to get told by the ticket office that the game was sold out and not a ticket was to be had. My skepticism had been rewarded with a shutout on the first night of professional hockey to be played in Belfast. I think I maybe entered some radio contests to win a ticket but by then I knew the hockey gods had struck down on a so called fan of the sport for ever doubting its pull.

Lesson learned, I ordered four seats for the second game to be played a week later.

I remember sitting watching BBC Newsline on the night of that first game, and they were paying the big game so much attention. Little did I know then it would be the most attention the BBC ever paid the Belfast Giants (baring one dark day just over a year later) but that’s a story for another day. They had their cameras rolling from inside the building showing us just how fantastic the venue really looked and how incredible it was going to be that night when the first game was played in front of a packed house. I turned off the TV.

And that’s all I remember about that first game that can’t be read about now by finding some ten year old article on the web. No doubt I checked the score after the game, read the news reports and even watched the highlights on the news but I can only assume I went out to the bar instead to imagine that no such event was even taking place without me present.

Of course, we all know how that game went; the Giants lost 2-1 to the now defunct Ayr Scottish Eagles, Paxton Schulte became a fan favorite by getting in a fight, the atmosphere was supposedly electric and the masses were hooked on this new sport called Ice Hockey. It was a shame they lost that first game I suppose, but somewhere deep inside of me I couldn’t help feel a sense of evil joy that perhaps I’d yet get to see the teams first win on home ice when my tickets came good for the following weeks game.

One look at the Giants line-up that night and you’ll see a bunch of names that signed up for something new, an adventure at becoming the countries first professional hockey team and trying to sell the sport to the masses. None of the players that took to the ice that night remain on the team – 10 full years would be rare at any level of sport, nevermind in the minor leagues, but we came dam close and there are still a presence of that team around today. Four of the defensive core from that night on 2 December 2000 – Jason Bowen, Shane Johnson, Rob Stewart and Todd Kelman – remain in the country with the later two still members of the Giants staff with Stewart an assistant coach and Kelman the general manager. Johnson only retired a year ago and Bowen, a fan favorite to this day even though he retired four years ago, has settled in the city.

The majority of course were just another group of minor league mercenaries etching out a living from the game, but unlike many who would come and go in the years that followed and whose names would become nothing more than a footnote in the clubs history, the group that took to the ice for that first game will always have a special place in the clubs lore; that they were the first to sell the game to an uneducated mass of people looking on with curiosity at this foreign sport, and hook them in for a decade to come.

Yes the crowds have fallen away from those glory days that marked the teams arrival in the City, but a large majority of those still sitting in the arena today – or like myself, not sitting in the arena but still in love with the team – can say they do so because that arena and that first team showed to them it could and would work.

So now, ten years burning down the road, new fans have been born – in some cases literally – and those that continue to take their seats in the Odyssey have turned into an educated mass of hockey fans looking on with interest, hooked on a sport for a decade and another decade to come. The baton of Giants fandom continues to be passed along but if that baton has a flame then the 2nd December 2000 was the match that lit it.

Sappy and cheesy? Yes. But then that’s what a 10 year anniversary will do and in 10 years time when they mark their 20th anniversary, if I’m spared, then I’ll rehash the whole thing again.