It sounded like some sort of clash betwixt the gods of Nordic mythology and those of Greece, but it was actually a playoff ice hockey game of the Norwegian League featuring Storhamar against Sparta that rose to the epic mythological heights for being the longest game in the history of the sport.
The official game time was 217 minutes, 4 seconds of play, which works out to 3.6 hours. At the professional level, hockey is typically three 20-minute periods. With all the resting, however, the game took nearly nine hours to complete and featured eight overtime periods.
For all that, it was a 2 – 1 victory for the Storhamar Dragons over the Sparta Warriors. The bloke who drives the ice-grooming Zamboni machine reportedly fell asleep at the wheel at one point. No, that did not actually happen, that was just us being whimsical.
In something from the truth-is-stranger-than-fiction department, the local police sent a series of tweets to alert members of the public that they need not be concerned about the whereabouts of friends and family members in attendance at the game. In some parts of the world, those police would have been roaming around outside the venue, looking to reap a bounty of over parking violations. More whimsy.
The longest know game in the National Hockey League took place in 1936 between the Detroit Red Wings and the Montreal Maroons.
