Reusse: The Wild’s grip on their supporters stands out as Minnesota’s firmest

The Wild were starting the second half of their schedule on home ice Thursday night against Colorado. As an attraction, they were going up against the televised drama of Notre Dame playing Penn State in the semifinals of the College Football Playoff.

There was a time when such a large moment for Notre Dame football would have been insurmountable competition for a live sporting event taking place in the Saintly City.

As an example of America’s most famous Catholic institution and its pull in what was then a heavily Irish St. Paul, Lou Holtz resigned as the short-term, exceedingly popular coach of the football Gophers to go to Notre Dame on the day after Thanksgiving in 1985.

Three months later, Lou came back here to speak to faithful Notre Damers. The site was the biggest ballroom they could find at the St. Paul Hotel, and it was jammed with Fighting Irish worshippers.

Point being, times have changed dramatically over there on the side of the twin towns that our man Sid Hartman occasionally would refer to as “East Berlin.”

The North Stars were in Bloomington for 26 seasons. They basically went broke twice, and Norm Green vamoosed for Dallas after the 1992-93 season. The Wild opened play as an expansion team in the new building in St. Paul in the fall of 2000.

An owners lockout wiped out the 2004-05 campaign, so this is Season 24 for the Wild and Season 50 for the modern NHL in Minnesota. And while there does remain enough nostalgia for the North Stars that the Wild wear a copy of their uniforms a good share of the time, there’s no question as to which franchise has been the public’s choice for support.

OK, there were hundreds of thousands fewer people in the metro area when the North Stars left than there are now. You can start counting with Woodbury: 24,000 people in 1993, 80,000 now.

Many more people to draw from, but also at prices enormously higher than at Met Center. Back then, the most visible St. Paul customers were East Side guys in bar jackets spending a fiver for a ticket and a 10-spot for a round of beers.

What we’re getting to here is my belief that the Wild, in their quarter-century of existence, have created the No. 1 phenomenon of long-term customer support for any major sports activity in Twin Cities history.

Vikings, you say.

Really? Eight home games a year, maybe nine. Two-thirds of those in the late summer or fall. Easy peasy to be a Vikings customer.

The Wild — 41 home games (regular season), two-thirds of those in the winter, and trying to worm your way into an aged parking ramp that has the zaniest design on the planet. I’ve been parking there forever and still made the wrong move trying to escape on a recent visit.

On about Floor 4 (meaning three to go), a guy starts yelling, “What are you doing, old man? You’re going up a down ramp.”

Me: “I know it now, but it’s too late. Upward … with a Hail Mary.”

St. Paul. Might not have as many Notre Dame fans as in decades past, but it does maintain great pride in being a maze — and with the RiverCentre ramp as the symbol.

And yet, the people from the west suburbs commuting on I-394 will back up to Hwy. 100, crawling toward the I-94 tunnel (“Satan’s Tunnel,” I’ve termed it) to get to Wild games … and on any night of the week.

On this Thursday, a light snow had started by midafternoon and the commute was extra slow.

So what? It was another Xcel overflow: 18,979 announced vs. the seating capacity of 18,300. The Wild, after missing the outstanding center Joel Eriksson Ek for 11 games with a knee problem (apparently), got him back five games earlier and had won four of those.

So, the Wild were hot again, except Thursday’s lineup was missing top defensemen Brock Faber, Jonas Brodin and Jared Spurgeon, and superstar Kirill Kaprizov up front. All those missing parts were going to be a problem against a team with Nathan MacKinnon.

Colorado was up 3-1 entering the third, and when Parker Kelly made it 4-1 at 4:23, quite a few of us packed up and headed for the ramp. But here was the deal … every gaggle of fans I encountered in the skyway, walking the ramp — they were smiling, laughing, backslapping.

Final: Colorado 6, Wild 1, and a good time apparently was had by most people in Wild jerseys, with the notable exception of goalie Filip Gustavsson and the damage done to his goals-against average.