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Sports

Teddy Bear Toss Sparked by Goal that Wasn't

"Hold those bears," the announcer said. "It's the scenario you fear!" But the die was cast, and it rained teddy bears.
Workers sweep up unearned teddy bears.
Screen capture via YouTube/Sheffield Steelers TV 

Nothing sounds more ominous than deeming something a "teddy bear mishap," but there's really no other way to put this. At a game between the Sheffield Steelers and Coventry Blaze of the UK Elite Ice Hockey League, it looked like for all the world that the Sheffield hosts had scored a goal, but a sprawling stick save kept the puck from crossing the line, and thus begat a pretty big teddy bear mishap.

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The Teddy Bear toss, in which fans come with teddy bears in arms—probably a good thing to smuggle a flask in—and wait for the home team to score its first goal before raining stuffed bears down on the ice, is one of the more charming holiday traditions. It's a beautiful type of mayhem—just make sure you remove that flask—as bears blot out the sun lights and stadium workers corral them so they can be donated to charity. This is all fine and very good—except when it happens under false pretenses.

Things went awry at some point in the third period, so you know those fans had itchy teddy trigger fingers, when Steelers forward Jonas Westerling came in with a tight maneuver to slide the puck past the goalie and raised his arms in celebration. On closer inspection, however, the puck didn't fully cross the line. Instead, Coventry goalie Miroslav Kopriva made an incredible goal line stick save. But that was all imperceptible to the fans, who only heard a commotion, saw Westerling celebrating, and then started to go at it:

Maybe people were just too excited to get started—look at how many kids there are, enjoying the hell out of this—or maybe Westerling's celebration felt like confirmation. But in either event, the teddy bears started flowing, and nothing was going to stop them. And thank god for that, because the Steelers didn't even score the entire game at all, ending in a 2-0 loss.

This teddy bear mishap either goes to show that we, as humans, are all sheep and we just start going forward with some kind of group-think reaction without waiting for verification, or we just love having fun, and can't wait to get in on the action. In the holiday spirit, I'm inclined toward the latter.