HOCKEY TODAY: TRYING TO PUT UP A BRAVE FRONT ABOUT THE HOMETOWN HOCKEYSCAPE

It's a little ironic that the visiting team at the Kingston Memorial Centre yesterday is the one looking for a new city.

You try not to read too much into what you read, but one of the diehards (and Kingston hockey fans haven taken diehard to another strata) at Fronts Talk posted that the announced attendance of 2,168 for Sunday's 4-1 win win vs. the Mississauga IceDogs was more like "1,800 that actually showed up. The place seems to be getting quieter all the time."

That makes one's hair (what's left of it in my case) stand on end, especially in light of the renewed debate over the downtown arena and Frontenacs owner Doug Springer's threat to move the team if city council votes to kill a project. (A family member who was part of a group which designed plans to build a new rink on the Memorial Centre site and disapproved of the downtown idea, but was nevertheless astonished the other day that local politicans would take another vote after shovels were in the ground.)

It's sounding like the Ottawa Rough Riders all over again. Right to the end, Ottawa CFL Team Version 1.0 had their loyalists, but their numbers kept thinning and thinning. The team's management and its grappling with local politicians helped drive off casual fans.

In Kingston's case, building a new rink is one thing, but what about building public trust? Reading the tea leaves (and the message boards), you have to wonder.

The IceDogs (whom Eugene Melnyk is trying to do a quick property flip with so he can move his St. Michael's Majors into the Hershey Centre) are a top team and the Fronts are on a bit of roll. Beating the IceDogs made it seven wins in 10 games and vaulted them into fifth place in the conference. It was mild and sunny across Eastern Ontario, hardly the kind of weather that keeps people off the roads and cooped up indoors. Still, the announced crowd was barely half the size of the 4,152 who showed up Saturday in Erie to watch the dead-last Otters take their obligatory 7-3 reaming from the Ottawa 67's. Again, this is nothing new for Kingston.

Granted, this is written without knowing the Saturday night entertainment options are in Erie, Pennsylvania, but it's a good point of comparison. Despite growing competition for leisure time that wasn't around 12 or 15 years ago, Ontario Hockey League teams still manage to draw fans, and major junior hockey is growing -- 57 teams across Canada and U.S. border states, up from about 40 two decades ago, and more media coverage.

It ties in with the issues surrounding the new arena, but it's more about having gone decades without a winner, and wondering it will ever change -- you wonder if people have just given up until the situation (the arena and team management) changes. For cryin' out loud, though, Erie, Pa., got 4,000-plus out for a team who is unwatchable, and Kingston gets half of that with an half-decent team.

Being a Kingston fan has never exactly been the equivalent of being on the bridge between Paradise and Intercourse* ... but what's wrong with this picture and is the new arena going to be a cure-all?

Fronts 4 Mississauga 1: Matthew Kang scored once and assisted on two Matt Auffrey tallies, helping the Fronts move within a point of fourth-place Sudbury (Oshawa, in sixth, has two games in hand). The newly minted Kang-Auffrey-Bobby Bolt line was tagged as the "KAB line" by Whig-Standard witticist Pat Kennedy.

Brampton 4 67's 3: The Barberpoles took two of three, losing to the Battalion after the short turnaround. Bottom line: the 67's seem locked into a low No. 7 playoff seed (Brian Kilrea had this team pegged when he traded away co-captain Elgin Reid in December), but whether they could take more than a game off tight, well-coached Belleville in the playoffs seems kind of dubious.

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(* Those are also towns in Pennsylvania. Seriously.)

That's all for now. Send your thoughts to neatesager@yahoo.ca.