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This past weekend I went to watch the Montreal Alouettes play CFL football against the Hamilton Tiger-Cats at McGill's Molson stadium.

My seat was section I3, row 3, seat 13 and it gave me this view pre-game:

The unpleasant part of this seat is that just ahead and slightly to the left of where I was sitting you can see that black shape; it is a loud speaker, and so the music and announcements were louder than I would have liked being so close to the speaker. The game was to start at 16h and from the side I was sitting the sun was behind and to the right of me and that, for only until about 16h46 at which point the sun ducked low enough behind the stands behind me that I was in shade for the remainder of the game. This was good on this steamy 30c day.

To my left sat a young French speaking couple where, for at least the first quarter, the guy was explaining how CFL football works to the girl at every play. She was asking questions too so to listen in it was a nice experience to hear someone learning about the game.

By midway through the second quarter I took a few photos to show how full the stadium was; it is nice to see so many people supporting the team.

A fair distance to my left is where one quarter of the Cheerleading team position themselves, with each of the other three quarters taking the other corner positions around the field.

During the game it seemed there were quite a few questionable penalty calls against the Als that had a major impact on the game. Just the same; with about 4 minutes left in the fourth quarter the Als had a 3rd and 1 at about midfield and were behind by 6 points. I thought it dumb of them, but they decided to punt. Fortunately the Als defense, with the help of an extremely boisterous and excessively loud crowd behind them, stopped Hamilton. So the Tiger-Cats kicked the ball back to us and then we had 2:26 left at the Hamilton 45 and incredibly, in the very first passing play, we scored a touch down which put us ahead of Hamilton by 1 point.

Through yet another dumb and perhaps unwarranted penalty the Cats got the ball in a good position but only managed to score a field goal, so then they were up by 2. At this point there were only 37 seconds left in the game so it would take a miracle for the Als to pull this off. The miracle happened!!! They managed to eek out two or three plays, each of them gaining a first down, and as the clock ran down to zero that last play had David Coté, our kicker, kick a ~45 yard field goal putting us back on top.

The final score was 29-28 and there were 21024 people in attendance.