There’s not a day that goes by when we don’t wake up being thankful for being a sports fan in North Carolina. This November, the SportsChannel8 team and a panel of peers from NC media will be counting down to Thanksgiving with the top 25 things we have to be thankful for in this great state. 

What do you get when you put a commonly-liked winning team in the middle of three passionate fanbases who have spent the last seven months at each other’s throats who suddenly find themselves without an emotional outlet until college football starts again? You get people camping overnight in the box office just to beat online ticket sales, you get miles of unrivaled tailgating, and you get three hours of an ear-splitting soaked blanket of sound in the “loudest house in the NHL”. You get The Caniacs.

You often hear phrases like “you’ve never seen anything like it”, but that’s truly the case with Hurricanes fans. As you’ve seen with the surge of popularity of professional soccer in the US, the temptation is there to mimic what you see on TV from Anfield or Emirates, and American fans flock to MLS games to sing and chant and light flares like their European counterparts do. But when hockey expanded to North Carolina, after a few seasons in Greensboro and one year in Raleigh of getting used to the idea of an NHL team in the middle of North Carolina, a new culture was born in the NHL that wasn’t anything like what you’d see in Toronto or Chicago or Boston. It was uniquely ours. Continue reading What We’re Thankful For: #24 – The Caniacs →