Game 3 of the 1975 Stanley Cup Final between the Buffalo Sabres and Philadelphia Flyers is remembered today for one thing above the actual hockey: the weather, both outside the building and somehow inside it too.
Buffalo's arena, known as the Aud, wasn't built with late-May hockey in mind. The Sabres had never played this deep into the calendar before, and a brutal spring heat wave sent conditions inside the rink spiraling — humidity climbed as the evening went on, and the temperature gap between the warm air and the ice below started generating a genuine fog that hovered over the playing surface. Officials stopped play repeatedly, sometimes multiple times per period, so players could skate laps around the ice just to help disperse it. It became known, permanently, as the Fog Game.
The fog wasn't even the strangest part. Sometime during the first period, a bat that lived in the rafters of the Aud decided the humidity was a good excuse to come down and investigate, and it started flying low over the ice. During a stoppage in play, it made the mistake of swooping through the faceoff circle. Sabres forward Jim Lorentz calmly raised his stick and flicked the bat out of the air, killing it on the spot — earning him the nickname "Batman" from his teammates for the rest of his career. Flyers center Rick MacLeish picked the bat up off the ice and dropped it into the penalty box, presumably the only two-minute minor in NHL history served by a dead bat.
Somehow, an actual hockey game was still going on underneath all of this. Philadelphia built a lead, Buffalo clawed back to tie it, and the game went to overtime still wrapped in fog thick enough that play was stopped seven more times before Sabres winger René Robert finally scored the winning goal at 18:29 of the extra period.
The Sabres won the game, though Philadelphia went on to win the series and the Stanley Cup that year. But fifty years later, almost nobody talks about the actual final score of Game 3. They talk about the fog, and about the night a player swatted a bat out of the air in the middle of a Stanley Cup Final and just kept playing.