Welcome back friends! A lot has changed since we last spoke… We’ve partnered up with our friends at SportsChannel8 to take over the North Carolina sports media empire since Mike Maniscalco was recently overthrown by a grim overlord hell bent on ruining our mornings. In the spirit of being great leaders to you, our loyal followers, we decided it was time to flex our new found muscle with our beloved Hurricanes and demand some new options around fun in-game and around game stuff. So, we marched directly into the ivory towers over at 1400 Edwards Mill Rd and said in our brashest of voices “The New Sports Media Empire is here and we demand change. We demand local! We demand that you finally recognize the awesome amazing stuff that is the Triangle and do a minimum of eight games worth of promotions around all things local.” Well as you can imagine they immediately threw us ou… wait… IT WORKED?!?!

BREAKING NEWS: The Carolina Hurricanes later today will announce a slate of eight “Homegrown Hockey” games where they will feature local food, local beer, local artisans, and local music. Sounds cool huh? Here are just a few of the details:

Local Beer: The Hurricanes will partner with local breweries to bring in new and presumably delicious beers to the arena during Homegrown Hockey nights. Flights of four 6oz pours will be made available for the same arena price as a normal 24 oz beer. That means more tasty NC beer! Yeah beer!

Local Artisans: The Canes and Artspace will release special gameday posters designed by local artisans. Kinda like the great posters the Blue Jackets did last year, but infinitely better since it’s not Columbus.

Local Music: The Canes will team with Deep South Entertainment and deliver intermission musical interludes by a local band. If you’ve been to a game in Nashville, I’m sure it will be similar, but better because we are Raleigh. Somewhere, Airiel Down weeps.

Local Design: We’re more geeked for this one than we probably should be. The Canes are working with four Raleigh t-shirt design shops for a limited edition game day t-shirt for each Homegrown Hockey game. The designers include House of Swank, Porchfly, Oak City Hustle, and Runaway. We’re not naming favorites, but when cool cats like this are involved, you know its going to be amazing. Quantity will be limited per game… so get yours early.

Food: Yes, we love food. PNC Arena food is pretty good most days… but the Canes are going to crank it up with some local fun stuffs as well as “discussion starters”. If we were to guess, I would say seeing pimento cheese on a hot dog might not be out of the realm of possibility, and we have it on good word that a 5 lb pretzel may make an appearance as part of the Homegrown Hockey hoopla.

Here’s why we’re excited: The Canes are really making a concerted effort to engage the local community in ways that they never have before. With the team having high expectations this year, this is a great start to a recipe for success for the 2016-17 season. Watch the Canes’ website for a full announcement later today, but being the new leader in sports media here in NC, we wanted to bring it to you first.