‘It’s like watching at home:’ Brandt Centre hosts fans for world junior gold-medal game

Connor Bedard highlights are not a rare sight at the Brandt Centre.

But on Thursday, hundreds of fans got to watch the Regina Pats forward win gold with Canada at the 2023 world junior hockey championship in Halifax.

While Bedard didn’t have point in the game, Canada was able to bounce back from giving up a two-goal third-period lead to beat Czechia 3-2 in overtime.

“It’s way tense with three-on-three. It’s hard to watch that stuff,” Kris Pockett said while watching the gold-medal game. “(World juniors) seem to be special because it gets the whole country involved. It’s something fun.”

“That was overly intense. That was a game where you could not sit down,” Will Sanderson added. “Just don’t blink, you might miss it.”

Earlier in the day, REAL District announced the game would be shown on the scoreboard at the Brandt Centre.

That brought out around 300 hockey fans to take in the atmosphere as well as the game.

Fans were at the Brandt Centre to watch the gold-medal game of the world junior tournament on Jan. 5, 2023. (Britton Gray/980 CJME)

“We were going to watch it at home but then we got the email because we’re Pats season-ticket holders and I thought I had to come down here, see the atmosphere and cheer on Connor,” Cole Christensen said.

“It’s been like a really big bar. We’ve been high-fiving with everyone in our section. It has been unbelievable.”

“It’s great. I can’t believe they threw this together. It sounds like everyone got this together in one day,” Chad Greif noted. “It’s almost like being in a pub with the cheering in the middle sections we are in.”

“For the small crowd it is, it’s very loud and very into it. It’s like watching at home with the boys but it’s with a bunch of people. It gets the juices flowing for sure,” Kale Stoll said.

With the win, Canada is the first team to win back-to-back gold medals since its five-year winning streak came to an end in 2009.

“The (world juniors) in the summer was important but it didn’t have that right feeling. This gold medal and it being back in the winter would be huge,” Stoll said.

“We hold ourselves to a pretty high standard in Canada. I don’t think anything less than gold is acceptable,” Josh Morrison added.