Each week, commenter Rocket writes about the NHL. This seems to be working out well. Rocket?

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I am in desperate need of the RandBall intelligentsia. This includes Clarence Swamptown. Many winters ago, while I was still living in the hamlet of Grand Forks, the town Scapulimancer beckoned me to his hovel. The annual feast of the "Dawn of the Ice Men Who Misrepresent Other Men On Their Chests" was winding down and there were plenty of shoulder blades for the gnarled old man to ply histrade. Quiet at first, the old man stood dreamily in front of his boiling cauldron. With eyes closed, he seemed to be in a trance. But soon a small giggle crawled through his thin lips, gently and steadily building until a full jocular roar shook every fiber in his building. When he finally recovered from his fit he looked at me and said, "The tenth moon cycle of the year of the forests will be especially meaningful to you. Try not to [redacted] it up." With a wave of his hand, he dismissed me from his dingy abode. Being too young to understand, I returned to the festival, had more mutton stew and blaunderellys, and quickly forgot the incident. And yet, here we are. I find myself in the midst of a period in my professional life whichmight go a long way in determining my success or failure in my chosen profession. Of course, I would never trust any decisions about my career to a collection of internet weirdos. Rather, my question has to do with hockey. I will find myself in Los Angeles over the weekend at a conference full of people who think they are smart and therefore either find sports detestable, pretend to find sports detestable, or who like to watch sports through a Foucaultian lens in order to draw parallels to the Panopticon's "unequal gaze." It also turns out that the Kings will be in town on Saturday. For whatever reason, I find myself compelled to go to the game, even though they will be playing the lowly (and hated) Dallas Stars. Considering my associates for the weekend, if I go to the game I am probably going to have to go alone. And so I forced with a dilemma: Should I go to a hockey game (most likely) by myself or not? I have made a small list of Pros and Cons. Cons: I don't really care about the Kings, even though they have some good young talent and a relatively exciting team. While it is easy to work up some venom for them, the Stars are terrible and are not the kind of team you go out of your way to see. My hotel is over twelve miles from the Staples Center and I don't (yet) have a rental car. So, I can't walk and would have to go through the bother of getting myself to and from the game (or renting a car basically just to go to the game). Hockey rinks aren't quite like baseball stadiums. Whereas there is often a weepy romanticism when it comes to visiting different ballparks, there is no such (often queasy) sense of grandeur when visiting different professional rinks. It's LA, so it's going to be pricey. Pros: It's [redacted] hockey.

So, fellow RandBallaholics, what say you? Would you ever go to a random sporting event in a different city, most likely by yourself, just because you had the chance to do so? Assuming there is any, what is the proper protocol on going to a game by oneself? How much would you pay for the experience? To what lengths would you go to see the game? Just how badly do you want a report from the game for next week's post? What would you do if you were in my shoes?