To view this site you need Adobe Flash Player and your browser must allow javaScripts. Go here to get the latest Flash Player. Dad’s Last Game “The Sabres’ penultimate season at The Aud was cut short by the NHL player lockout. When the game was finally back on in January, I was so excited I bought a pair of tickets to the opener, even though I was broke. “Do you have a date yet?” asked my brother, knowing that I had to have just the right date for hockey games, and I wasn’t always successful. Mark had promised to take both his best friend and our father to the game. The solution was easy– I finally got to take my Dad to a hockey game. After our traditional pre-game meal of spaghetti, we all headed to The Aud together. We walked Mark to his seats in the Reds, and Dad and I continued up the long aisle toward the only seats I could afford, in the Oranges. “I’ve never been in the Oranges before,” Dad remarked casually, not realizing how humiliated I was by that revelation. As we boarded the escalators at the top of the Blues, someone I’d just seen interviewed on Empire Sports stepped on behind us. “Dad, that’s Doug Moss!” I exclaimed, a little amazed to be in close contact with the first nonKnox president of the Sabres at his first game in that capacity. But I’d said it so loudly that Mr. Moss must have heard me, so I had little choice but to include him in the conversation. “You’re Doug Moss!” I said to him. He knew that. And he chatted with my father and me about hockey and the Sabres all the way up the escalators until he left us to go a few steps further up to the press box. Once in our seats, Dad made me feel like a million bucks: “Too bad Mark has to sit down there with all the riff-raff, when we get to be up here with the important people.” My father was gone five months later–cancer–and that turned out to be his last Sabres game. After he died, while sorting through the safe that held his will and the property deeds, was one more irreplaceable document: the program his little girl bought him at the first hockey game she ever took him to.” - Suzanne K. Taylor 4 5 View through the north end of The Aud from an icy rink surface. SUZANNE K. TAYLOR