2022 Stanley Cup Final - How Blink-182's 'All the Small Things' became a big deal for Colorado Avalanche fans

DENVER — It's the third period at Ball Arena. The Colorado Avalanche are playing in the Stanley Cup Final against the Tampa Bay Lightning, but hockey is about to take a brief back seat to a millennial singalong for 18,000 fans.

The familiar opening chords to Blink-182's «All The Small Things» echo through the arena and the Colorado fans sing the lyrics en masse. As the Avalanche and Tampa Bay Lightning players return to the ice after a brief timeout, the music drops out — but the voices carry, acapella style.

«Late night, come home/

Work sucks, I know...»

«It's a phenomenon made by the fans,» Craig Turney, a.k.a. DJ Triple T, told ESPN.

The place to be! Hoping for more of this over at Tivoli tonight.<a href=«https://twitter.com/hashtag/GoAvsGo?src=hash&ref_src=» https: www.espn.com>#GoAvsGo

pic.twitter.com/d4o8GVVzbu

He's been the Avalanche's game night DJ since 2007. In Fall 2019, he was listening to a local radio station's «Throwback Thursday» when it played Blink-182 classic, conjuring images of their boyband-parodying music video from 1999.

So he decided to throw it into the rotation for Avalanche home games. «The very first time we did it, the music dropped down and we could hear some people singing. By the end of the next game, we felt like we had something. And then we had to figure out the best way to deploy it,» said Turney.

The song usually hits midway into the third period, but exactly when it hits is entirely dependent on the game.

«We didn't force it down their throats. It's all based on feel. It doesn't have to do if we're winning or losing or whatever. It's all about whether it feels right to play it at that point in the game,» said Turney.

That approach has rarely failed him… except in last year's