After 45 Years, This Could Be It For Hockey at Key Arena

After this season, the Seattle Thunderbirds are moving to Kent Events Center.

So, if they should lose tonight, in game seven in their first-round WHL playoff series against Kelowna, that's it for hockey at Key Arena, née Seattle Center Coliseum, which has hosted a hockey team more or less consecutively for nearly half a century.

The first pro sports tenant of Key Arena wasn't the Sonics--who didn't exist until five years after the structure was built--but the Seattle Totems of the Western Hockey League.

The Totems began play in the Coliseum in 1963. Opening Night was an exhibition game against the NHL's Toronto Maple Leafs, according to Bill Schonely, then the Totems' radio guy, and later the beloved play-by-play man of the Portland Trailblazers. "Everybody was in tuxedos," he wrote in his 1999 autobiography. "It was a big night."

"It was the Huskies and the Totems" in those years, Schonely wrote, and the Totems were damn popular. Bill Sears, later the Pilots' PR man, says in the book that, in the Sonics' early years, the Totems outdrew the fledgling NBA team by wide margins.

The Totems won back-to-back Western Hockey League championships, in 66-67, and 67-68. The Western Hockey League wasn't then a junior hockey league like it is now, it was a minor pro league like today's American Hockey League.

(If you must know, it was actually a completely different league. There have been three leagues known as the "Western Hockey League"--the Totems were in the second of those, which started as the "Pacific Coast Hockey League" and was renamed "Western Hockey League" in 1952. That "Western Hockey League" folded in 1974. The current "Western Hockey League" has always been a junior hockey league--it was once known as the "Western Canada Junior Hockey League." Yes, this is the most trivial paragraph ever written.)

In 1974, the Totems played--and beat--the world-champion Russian national team at the Coliseum before a crowd of more than 12,000.

The Totems folded after the 1974-75 season because Seattle was supposed to get an NHL franchise. That never happened, and in '77, the Seattle Breakers, now Thunderbirds, came to town. (Though the Totems name and logo lives on with the Seattle Junior Totems, who played in last weekend's Junior National Championships, winning one out of three games.)

The T-Birds play tonight at 7:05. Should be a fun time, and I'd be going if my girlfriend hadn't selfishly failed to consult the Western Hockey League playoff schedule before purchasing our tickets for Cabaret.

Will the last pro sports franchise to leave Key Arena please turn out the lights?