Maple Leaf Gardens was the home of the Toronto Maple Leafs of the National Hockey League.

Okay, so it's not exactly a "Field" of Dreams. It's a Rink of Dreams. I missed the Boston Garden, the Montreal Forum, and Chicago Stadium, all of which closed during my adulthood and I should have known better. I would have missed Maple Leaf Gardens as well, if not for a friend who put forward the idea of a trip to Toronto to see the old barn.

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This is a great old place that has been immaculately maintained through the years. The exterior is done in yellow brick with an art-deco flavor and the massive white roof with the blue maple leaves painted on it were a wonderful site from my hotel room. Inside, the ceiling soars high above the ice with girders and rafters and all sorts of other good stuff.

The seats rise straight up from the sides of the ice, vanishing into the high reaches on either side, while the seats at the ends are scrunched right up to the glass and piled on top of each other. There is a very simple reason for this. The place is wedged into a city block and there wasn't any more room.

The passageways are very tight and claustrophobic, but that's part of the charm of a building shoe-horned into the heart of the city. The best thing about it is that it is right there on the street rather than surrounded by acres of parking lots. Game night turns the whole area into the center of the hockey universe and you feel like there is no place else on Earth to be. On the night I attended, the Leafs won.