Put it over the radio: New York’s Bravest and Finest will light the lamps on the ice this weekend.
The annual NYPD and FDNY hockey game — a grudge match filled with flying fists, punishing hits and high-octane play from the departments’ heroes — is a day circled on every first responder’s calendar.
“This is basically our Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Final,” firefighter and goalie Nick Battaglia told The Post.
“The first two minutes of that game, everyone wants to kill each other. Nobody’s worried about the puck,” added NYPD general manager and former captain Charlie Venticinque. “If you have the puck, you’re getting tanked.”
The game sells out NHL arenas year after year, and this time at UBS Arena at 1:30 p.m. Sunday will be no different. Fans and family come ready to roar and even bring banners and signs for their kin to make it feel like the real deal.
Months on end, teammates in their mid-20s to late-40s have been doing whatever it takes to be in game, or rather fighting, shape.
They want to put on a show in the 52nd annual head-to-head meeting.
“Guys are missing work, missing overtime, missing things with their family, switching their tours around,” said newly anointed NYPD captain and defenseman George Antzoulis. “Guys are staying at work for three days straight, going from hockey back to work, sleeping in the office, sleeping in chairs, sleeping in their cars in the parking lot.”
It’s a labor of love, pride, and brotherhood, as tugging on that jersey — Antzoulis knows stepping on the ice with the “C” on his chest will be an emotional moment — represents something much larger than the individual athlete.
They’re always reminded of that in the locker room on game day.
Families of members lost in the line of duty have come in to inspire the players, as have the brass of both departments.
“You get chills,” said NYPD center and alternate captain Dan O’Donoghue, who was in Islanders rookie camp in 2010.
“Seeing the stands fill up, then you do the 9/11 remembrance, the bagpipes, and the national anthem … you try to take it all in. It goes really fast.”
Extra motivation to play through each whistle is hardly necessary — especially when the archrivals start chirping one another with cop and firefighter jokes.
When bone-crushing, open-ice hits mix in — O’Donoghue added that he’s “usually limping around the house a week or so after” — the gloves “organically” come off, said FDNY right wing Stephen Kelly.
“That passion runs through you. … We stand up for each other, we look out for each other,” he added, recalling a few past brawls that went viral online in the wild game for charity. “It’s just like your family at home. You’re going to defend them … whether you’re at work or on the hockey rink. That’s the fire department brotherhood.”
The temporary adversaries, many of whom grew up playing with or against one another, remember they’re all on the same team where it counts after the final buzzer.
“At the end of the day, everybody knows it’s a hockey game,” Kelly said.
The teams are now celebrities in the hockey world from their remarkable style of lambasting physical play — it gets the rowdy crowd going like an Islanders-Rangers game — as they travel across the country to face other teams and organizations.
The NYPD recently took on the Boston PD, and the FDNY typically lands in an Ontario firefighter hockey tournament, where the opposition is in a league of its own.
“Those departments, they recruit hockey players to be firemen,” firefighter forward Derek Kern said of the Canadians. “They have draft picks, they have guys that played in the NHL.”
FDNY’s high level of competition has paid off, as red hasn’t lost to blue in a decade.
They also hold a 31-18-2 all-time record against the NYPD, dating back to the first game at Madison Square Garden in 1974.
But the cops want to read ’em their rights this time around.
“We’re due. Man, we need one … it’s something I’m dying for,” Antzoulis said.
But if not, the captain is content having an unforgettable day with his brothers.
“There are 33,000 cops in the NYPD, and there are only 30 of us,” he said. “We’re the luckiest 30 in the world.”
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
