John Blanchette: Spokane’s the arena to ramp up the amps

Just stopped by the Spokane Arena on Saturday night to see if anything had changed. Figured all that lunacy from last year just couldn’t carry over.

Then the Spokane Shock scored a touchdown on the game’s first play.

Their own kickoff.

Can’t imagine what I must have been thinking.

Then came all the rest of it. The skinny center fielder shagging interceptions and hurling balls into the stands. The big fan with the Mohawk – dyed orange, naturally. The one-time soccer player from Eastern squeezing along the walls for big yards and bigger touchdowns. The big-hair ‘80s song playlist, cranked up beyond concert-hall pitch between every whistle. Another goal-line stand in a sport that’s supposed to render a defense impotent. Players leaping into the arms of the patrons ringside. More No. 9 jerseys than Jim McMahon sold. Another 30-point lead that wasn’t really safe.

And, of course, fans making their way down aisles, two beers at a time.

It’s true.

Arena football really is the Spokane game.

OK, OK, save the indignation for a proper insult. This is not to say that we don’t still dig basketball because quite obviously we do – we even have another terrific college team to dig. Our hockey ardor may have cooled, but a Saturday night can still be special provided the hockey team ever again plays a meaningful game on a Saturday night.

Elsewhere you’ll find the details of the Shock’s 51-35 victory over the Stockton Lightning in the af2 season opener and the names both old and new that made it happen. If any of the purported crowd of 10,639 who witnessed the proceedings either in person or the television audience found some of the aesthetics lacking, well, be advised that the new coach, Adam Shackleford did, too.

Also be advised that more and better is yet to come.

“When we get into the season, we’ll run a variation of 140 different plays,” Shackleford said. “Tonight we ran 14. We’ll spoon-feed the rookies and keep the basics on until they grasp the whole concept of what we want to do.”

Make a note, too, that Quad City comes to town next week, and the Steamwheelers scored 81 points Saturday night against the Cincinnati Somethings. So the spoon-feeding may have to segue quickly into ripping out big sections of the playbook and swallowing them whole.

But it has to be a comfort for the Shock to sense that even if they’re not in midseason form, their adoring mob can be if the score makes it necessary.

Shackleford, a rookie in town, found losing his Shock virginity “electrifying.

“I’m not sure whether it pumps our players up more,” he said, “or demoralizes their players.”

The vote here is for demoralizing the other players. Surely they’d rather be part of the roaring, self-lubricating throng rather than trying to claw back from 20 points in the hole.

And that way they don’t have to go back to Stockton or wherever and ask, “Why Spokane and not here?”

Which is a pretty good question, in any case.

The knee-jerk answer, of course, is that the Shock win, and surely the strange and wondrous march to the af2 championship in year one of their existence captured civic imaginations in a way a .500 team wouldn’t. Even Shackleford, who has the tough act to follow, acknowledged as much.

“This town loves a winner – look at how they love Gonzaga basketball,” he said. “It deserves a winner and we’re going to keep working to give them one.”

But remember that the Shock were selling out the Arena by last year’s second game, and the guys in the orange jumpsuits were already roosting in Section 216. The arena experience struck a chord long before anyone imagined a banner going up on the wall.

So it isn’t just winning.

It’s because it’s new. It’s football, but it isn’t. It’s football with its big hits and long bombs in the unfriendly confines of a hockey rink, with a ball you can see and touchdowns you can be sure of instead of a puck and goals you can’t. And there’s no damned glass.

“It’s a fast, intense game,” said receiver Raul Vijil, the receiver from Eastern. “It’s crowd friendly. You’re hitting the walls, you’re getting high-fives from the fans. They’re part of the game.”

It’s at that nothing time of year hereabouts – after final horns of basketball and hockey and long before the first pitch and fall’s first kickoff, which happens in another town anyway.

“They don’t have a professional sport here,” said lineman Jerome Stevens. “It’s Gonzaga and Wazzu, and Gonzaga’s all done and Wazzu’s two hours away.”

And, yes, it’s a touch of WWE – a little woofing, a little showboating, a lot of promotional hoohah, a too-loud P.A. system and shapely dancers in snug outfits.

Also, there is beer. Not to be overlooked in our town, ever.

“They want to come out and party,” Stevens laughed.

So they do. And in the process, they’ve created a party that Shackleford, for one, feels is unprecedented.

“I don’t think Spokane realizes is, but they are such a unique experience in arena2 football,” he said. “That kind of crowd and atmosphere doesn’t happen anywhere else – and I’ve been all over the country coaching this game.”

The Spokane game. A year later, that hasn’t changed.