On Oct. 8, the night of Dave Hakstol's first regular-season game as the Flyers' head coach, Nate Ewell and two other men settled at a second-floor corner table at Rivalries Sports Pub and Grill in Portland, Maine, and commandeered a television.
Portland is Boston Bruins country, and since there are exactly 32 TVs at Rivalries, it's safe to assume 31 of them were tuned to the Bruins' game against the Winnipeg Jets. But Ewell, who is the deputy executive director of the nonprofit organization College Hockey Inc., and his companions - a video coordinator for the University of North Dakota men's hockey team and a reporter who covered UND - wanted to watch the Flyers play the Tampa Bay Lightning instead.