On March 12, the NHL announced that its next Global Series competition would take place in Tampere, Finland, in November. This year’s edition of the event, which has been around since 2017, would feature two pretty logical teams. One would be the eventual Stanley Cup champions Florida Panthers, captained by Tampere’s own Alexander Barkov. The other would be the Dallas Stars, whose core prominently features Finns Miro Heiskanen, Roope Hintz, and Esa Lindell.
This was the trip the Stars had been awaiting. Club president Brad Alberts told Sean Shapiro shortly after the announcement that, after the Stars had missed out on a chance to do a similar trip in China in 2020—take a wild guess at what scotched that one—the NHL had given them the choice between going to the Global Series in Sweden in 2023, or waiting for Finland in 2024. Alberts said it was a no-brainer for the Stars to wait for Finland, as more Finnish players have passed through the organization than any other team in the NHL, including Jere Lehtinen, whose jersey now hangs in the rafters of American Airlines Center.
Finland is a place where hockey isn’t everything, but it is one of the biggest things. International hockey victories over Sweden and Russia hold special significance, as you might expect, but this isn’t a country that defines itself by victory or defeat, but rather the enduring story of a people who persistently accomplish more than you might expect. To wit: 5 percent of NHL players today hail from Finland, despite its being a country with a smaller population than the Metroplex.
Seeing it all for myself sounded like a fantasy. As late as September, I was still working in education full-time while covering the Stars on nights, weekends, and early mornings. Then, right as the Stars were about to begin training camp, I was at a philosophical impasse with our school district. Boring details ensued, but the crux of it all was that in early October I found myself booking flights, hotels, and a rental car halfway around the world. While one of my careers ended faster than you wake up from a nightmare, I decided to live out the dream and head to Helsinki for the hockey adventure of a lifetime.
Yes, Helsinki. Even though the games would be played two hours inland, at Nokia Arena in Tampere, the Stars initially flew into the capital of Finland for three days, arriving on Monday, October 28 before heading to Tampere on Wednesday afternoon, where they would play meaningful NHL regular-season games on Friday and Saturday.
Although Helsinki is the capital of Finland, it felt like I could walk to almost any corner of it in less than an hour. Despite the many waterways connecting and permeating the city, there’s a beautiful charm to its varied aesthetic: equal parts modern and classical, with a focus on mass transit and walkable roads. My rental car came equipped with studded winter tires—mandatory in Finland starting on November 1—and they clattered awkwardly across some of the cobbled roads threading through the city. Whenever I could, I chose to walk.
The reasons the Stars began their journey there were threefold. First, it would give them a chance to adjust to the time difference before playing the first of their two games against the Panthers. Second, in the spirit of growing the game, Dallas conducted a practice at the Herttoniemen Ice Rink, where the three Finnish players were predictably inundated with questions from delighted media members.
Third, and perhaps most significantly, it provided a chance to visit the Helsinki suburbs of Vantaa and Espoo, the birthplaces of Heiskanen and Lindell. For those two and Hintz, the trip was also a chance to share their country’s customs with their teammates, including Finnish food and the sauna culture. It was an opportunity to visit some of their most meaningful haunts, as Heiskanen returned to one of his favorite home rinks where he practices each summer.
Lindell, meanwhile, took the Stars to see a hockey team of his own. You may recall Sean’s story from January when Lindell joined the ownership group of Jokerit, the bad boys of Helsinki hockey. On Tuesday, October 29, the Stars got a chance to see one of the games in person, so I tagged along in the first major stop on my own journey.
The experience of a European hockey game is one every fan should have on his or her bucket list. The first thing I noticed is the eerie-but-polite silence of the entrance line. The second was that all beer had to be purchased and consumed on the concourse, as alcohol isn’t allowed in the main seating area of the rink. This, as you can imagine, makes for a fairly empty seating area during intermission as the beer lines fill up with customers, who then polish off said drinks and make a mad dash back to their seats in the final minute before puck-drop.
On this occasion, I also noticed one other uncharacteristic hubbub for low-key Finland: Lindell at the front of an autograph line, the customary position for Jason Robertson and Wyatt Johnston. Fans were eagerly queueing up to take selfies, get signatures, and to say (though the eternally humble Lindell was loathe to admit it to me) “thank you” to the man who returned to his boyhood team to restore it to its former glory.
As for the game, the experience is more akin to a Premier League football (soccer) match than any hockey game you’d recognize stateside. The entire section behind the home goal is packed with fans who stand for the entire game, lest they be kicked out of the cheering section for sitting. One man with a megaphone led the couple of hundred faithful in songs and cheers from the Jokerit fan hymn book. (Lindell mentioned remembering a few of the songs from his teenage years playing for the club.)
It was the first time Lindell had attended a regular-season Jokerit game in years, let alone his first as a co-owner. Even more than that, he got to do so with his teammates, coaches, and Stars executives there with him. While talking to Lindell during the first period, it was plain to see that I wasn’t the only one living a dream come true in Finland.
“It’s nice,” Lindell said, pausing to soak in some of the deafening cheers in the seats below us. “I’m pretty lucky.”
At least you can’t accuse him of hyperbole.
The next day, the Stars took a train roughly 100 miles north and set up shop, along with the Panthers, in the hotel attached to Nokia Arena in an attempt to get back into hockey mode. So on that same Wednesday, I packed up and drove my rental car two hours north to stay in the smaller, snowier, and hockey-crazed city of Tampere, just nine miles from where Hintz grew up.
Think of Tampere as the Austin to Helsinki’s Dallas, the hipster cousin known for its fashion scene—a scene to which Hintz is no stranger. During his week back home, he announced the release of signature shoes to raise money for local children’s charities. Hintz is uniquely avant garde among Finnish sports stars, a trendsetter who is exceptionally popular with Finnish youth for his cutting-edge fashion sense. Sure enough, while walking around the city on Thursday, I discovered there was no shortage of hip restaurants and fashionable clothing boutiques that I surely couldn’t afford to shop in.
If you needed a final assurance of Tampere’s street cred, my Thursday guide Maiju’s most recent trip to the U.S. was to attend South by Southwest in Austin in March. This was a hockey town, yes, but you would be wise not to mistake it for a town of conformity.
Tampere is also the location of the first indoor ice rink in Finland, as well as the Finnish Hockey Hall of Fame (Suomen Jääkiekkomuseo). One curator told me the museum often receives donations of everything from decades-old equipment to Finnish Olympic medals, one of which was dropped off in a humble plastic bag with only the smallest bit of advance notice.
It is also where Nokia Arena was recently built, and where Barkov brought the Stanley Cup this summer while celebrating the Panthers’ victory.
On Thursday evening, I was treated to a dinner by two employees of the city. One of them, Saara, was the driving force behind the Barkov City banners that heralded the glorious return of the Panthers captain after Florida’s championship in June. It was not surprising, therefore, to see more Barkov sweaters around Tampere than those of any other player. In this town, perhaps more than any other in Finland, hockey means something special.
As you would expect, then, ticket prices for an event like this were prohibitively expensive for many locals. Maybe someday, the NHL will be in Finland more than once every few years, but even if you weren’t inside the building last weekend, you couldn’t escape the excitement. Case in point: nearly 100 former Finnish NHLers (including former Stars Lehtinen, Jussi Jokinen, and Niko Kapanen) attended an award ceremony at Tampere City Hall for the legendary Finnish hockey pioneer Jari Kurri on Saturday afternoon. Why wouldn’t you want to visit Tampere, on this of all weekends? Finnish President Alexander Stubb apparently agreed with me; he, too, made an appearance at Kurri’s ceremony.
So I had high expectations when I made my way to the arena on Friday for the Global Series opener. I was not disappointed.
The crowd was into it, singing and chanting and belting the Finnish national anthem in all its chilling beauty. But they were sophisticated about it: fans began clapping during extended zone pressure to throw one team off-kilter. They oohed and ahhed when players made great passes more so than big hits. Arena efforts to have the crowd Get loud! and Make some noise! were far less effective than they tend to be in the States, appearing probably a bit nonsensical to a people accustomed to logic more than rancor.
There were touches of home, too.
The Stars brought along Jeff K to do the in-arena announcements as a neutral party, which nevertheless didn’t dampen the delight of hearing a familiar voice in a far-off country. The mascots of the Stars and Panthers roamed the crowd to the delight of the fans, and the intermissions were, of course, filled with long lines on the concourse for beer purchases and consumption.
As for the hockey, the less said the better. Dallas put together a flat first period on Friday and never managed to close an early two-goal deficit before losing 6-4. Saturday brought similar struggles. While the game felt closer, the Stars once again fell into a 2-0 hole en route to another two-goal loss.
But as Dallas coach Peter DeBoer said, the week was about more than just the games. At the start of warmups on Friday, the three Finnish players led the Stars onto the ice, even doing a first lap alone as rookies typically would. When starting lineups were announced, the seven Finnish players on the two teams were put into the lineup by their coaches, earning cheers as raucous as you’d imagine when announced by Jeff K.
The crowd erupted when Lindell scored in the first game, but that paled in comparison to the explosion that ensued when Barkov did the same. And from what I could tell, a lot of those same people were cheering after both goals. Because as beloved as Barkov is in his home city, everyone in the building seemed to recognize that the reason for these games, in this building, was more about the country than one of its natives.
It’s not often that a hockey fan can look past a loss, and indeed, Stars players and coaches were much less cheerful afterward than they had been earlier in the week. But this was the rare exception, which was especially true for me. To see these games while experiencing a fantastic country for the first time was a privilege and a joy. And, at risk of generalizing like most American tourists after a week in a foreign country, an educational experience.
Before the trip, I asked Lindell what I could do to avoid betraying myself as yet another American tourist. With his typical deadpan, Lindell responded, “Maybe stay inside.” He wasn’t wrong.
The people of Finland are renowned for their aversion to small talk, which was on display any time I was in a line and caught myself trying to ease the awkward silence with more awkward conversation. Folks in Finland are more than content to stand and queue up, perhaps talking quietly with the friend or family member close at hand, but almost never engaging in what we would call “chatter.”
One man I asked about this said that Finns are happy to talk—when there is something of substance to talk about. And that honest, utilitarian approach helped me better understand so many things while I was there.
I understood Finland’s empathy by way of being able to get by in English pretty consistently, which is a convenient linguistic trait Finland shares with its Scandinavian neighbors (though don’t you dare call Finland a part of Scandinavia). That I never once felt even a hint of resentment about my need to do so is testament to the friendliness of the citizens often ranked as the happiest in the world (or a bit of my own cheerful oblivion to what other people might experience as coldness).
I also understood why the Finnish people are so enthusiastic about saunas. More than 3 million of them are scattered throughout the country, and they embody that unique mixture of hospitality and amiable taciturnity. I experienced it myself below deck on a boat ride to Suomenlinna, an island fortress just off the coast of Helsinki that also houses an old church, a prison, and some wonderful restaurants. If I did my Celsius-to-Fahrenheit conversions correctly, we sweated up to more than 150 degrees, which is weirdly satisfying once you push past the initial discomfort. When the sweat starts pouring down your face, it’s comforting to look around and see other people sitting there, choosing to endure the same thing. It’s not unlike a runner’s high, where you find you can keep your body doing something difficult, knowing that you’ll rest when you really have to. Put simply, it’s like having a staring contest with your own core temperature.
Then our boat’s captain dropped anchor, and I came to understand another Finnish tradition: alternating sauna-sitting with cold-plunging.
It helped me grasp just a little bit more about why Finnish hockey players are so often labeled as “consistent” and “hardworking.” That’s because your muscles and lungs start acting differently in the Baltic Sea in November. Within 10 seconds, it’s hard to finish a sentence. Your range of motion deteriorates, no matter what swimming stroke you choose. Your body aches to curl up in a futile effort to conserve warmth—but you’re so far past shivering that your muscles don’t even bother. They just grow tight, and suddenly you wonder for how much longer swimming will be possible.
Heiskanen, Hintz, and Lindell, like their Finnish brethren, talked eagerly of how much it meant to be able to sauna together, to sit silently sweating, then enduring temperatures so cold that “cold” isn’t the sensation your nerve endings communicate. To push oneself to the edge, then to push oneself a bit farther the next time is a delight for Finns, our guides told me. This is how you find out what you’re really capable of. If you’re not pushing yourself, you’re not discovering anything.
I’m always hesitant to generalize about hockey players based on their nationality, but Heiskanen and Lindell most certainly have become well-known for their ability to endure consistently high minutes in tough situations during their NHL careers. Lindell frequently has played the full two minutes of penalty kills in recent seasons when it is far more common for defensemen to switch out after a minute. Heiskanen is consistently among the top 10, or even top five NHLers in minutes played per season. And Hintz has played entire seasons with painful injuries that he bore with equanimity. Pain, heat, and cold: they’re all just sensations.
Perhaps most of all, I came to understand sisu, a term that is both untranslatable and eminently Finnish. When I was touring Tampere, my tour guide described sisu as the way that, just when you think something has become too difficult to go on, you somehow find a way to continue. It is something within yourself that makes it possible to do what doesn’t feel possible initially.
It sounds a lot like a grander version of “perseverance” or “resilience” until you come to know what the Finnish people have withstood. They have endured the constant presence of a neighbor that invaded them at the outset of World War II, only for Finnish soldiers to repel the Soviet army far longer than anyone would have expected. Before the famous Soviet victory over the Germans at Stalingrad, the Red Army was humbled by the Finns at Tapiale, 45 degrees below zero.
Whatever word you want to use to sum up the essence of what distinguishes Finland’s people, I saw it. I saw that word, each day, in a people too resolute to let the emotional scars of that history dampen their kindness to foreigners. I discovered it in their culture, which is unapologetically theirs. I absolutely felt it in those icy waters. And I hope I took all of it with me on my flight across the Atlantic back home.
DeBoer made a point at his final postgame press conference last Saturday to talk about the trip. “I’d like to say kiitos to the people of Finland, particularly in Helsinki and Tampere for their hospitality,” the coach said, using the Finnish word for “thank you.” “That’s what I’m going to remember. I’m going to try and forget as quickly as possible about the two hockey games, but I’ve got some lifetime memories of how we were treated here.”
Without hesitation, I nodded in agreement.
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