FIRST PERSON : It’s All That It’s Quacked Up to Be at the Pond

From way up here in Section 430, amid a sea of optimism, we greeted our heroes.

It was opening night, of course, but not just any opening night. Here in “The Pond at Anaheim,” on this enchanted evening, was all the pageantry, spectacle and unbridled fervor that precedes the start of something new and different.

When the place went pitch black last night, the roar began and the rafters shook. For an instant, it felt like the world had come crashing in. All over a hockey team.

It was unmistakable Disney, right up there with the Pirates of the Caribbean and It’s a Small World. Much too nice for a hockey game.

The skating candlestick. The Decoys. The Zamboni spaceship. The overweight Duck mascot descending from the ceiling. It all made for a pretty good spectacle, but it wasn’t hockey.

Then the Ducks came skating out one by one, each bathed in a beam of light, and skidded to a stop to thunderous applause. For a hockey enthusiast, this was as good as it gets.

Many of the local fans have spent years traveling to Los Angeles to root for the Kings, and they still cannot believe their luck at having such a magnificent ice castle smack in the middle of Orange County, with a National Hockey League team to play in it, no less.

We are part of a rarefied set of season-ticket holders who, because we can’t afford to pay top dollar for rink-side seats, still have a few bucks left when we send our check into Disney. But we do so gratefully, secure in the knowledge that hockey is going to take root here in a big way and proud of getting here first.

Everything about the Mighty Ducks impresses us:

The magenta and teal uniforms.

The state-of-the-art electronic scoreboard.

The persistent honk of the duck calls.

The rock ‘n’ roll music.

The way the boisterous announcer bellows “The Mighty Ducks” each time they appear like magic onto the ice.

We are easily impressed.

Some of it is pure camp and a bit silly. Needless to say, a longtime supporter of the majestic Montreal Canadians would find much to sneer at--the polished marble surfaces and yogurt stands and the cartoonish duck emblem. But even that’s growing on us.

To be sure, this isn’t Chicago Stadium, where the fans are the loudest, or Madison Square Garden, where players who don’t do well are vilified, or even Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto, where it takes a while just to count the championship banners.

But it doesn’t matter. Hockey, even poorly played hockey with a pile of losses to come, is a step up on the quality-of-life ladder.

This is our chance to be on the ground floor so that on the day the Mighty Ducks win the Stanley Cup, oh say, 30 years from now, none of us season-ticket holders can be accused of jumping on the bandwagon.

Look what happened with the Kings. The games sell out and now the nouveau fans preen like peacocks in the first few rows off the ice. The rest of us wouldn’t be caught dead that close, knowing how much action can be missed. And at $200 or so per ticket, we can attend 10 games for the same price.

There is much for us to learn about the Mighty Ducks. Like the players’ names. We’ve got our favorite stars to select and authentic jerseys to order and, most importantly, secret traffic routes into and out of the parking lot to conceal from one another.

Schedules have long ago been scrutinized and dates circled, especially when our rivals, the Kings, come down the freeway for a good shellacking. We await Eric Lindros of the Philadelphia Flyers and Mario Lemieux of the Pittsburgh Penguins and lots of other players most sports fans have never heard of.

The point is, they’ll come to us, for three wonderful hours every few nights. And from our perch, with our duck calls and our scrappy new team, we will be waiting.