150 Thrashers fans travel to road game

Raleigh — Sally Cersosimo and 150 of her closest friends brought a little bit of Blueland to Tobacco Road on Saturday night.

They chanted Thrashers cheers, waved Thrashers signs, scarves and flags and turned Section 114 of the RBC Center into a northern version of Philips Arena’s Nasty Nest. Their team did what it does at most home games — it lost.

Carolina scored a pair of first-period goals and hung on to hand the Thrashers their fourth consecutive defeat and their second 2-0 loss in the past three games.

Cam Ward stopped all 19 Atlanta shots. Kari Lehtonen kept the Thrashers in the game with 38 saves but couldn’t prevent breakaway goals by Matt Cullen and Ray Whitney.

The 151 Thrashers fans managed to enjoy themselves, anyway.

“If we win, yay. If not, well, whatever. We have a good time,” said Cerosimo, who works at Stone Mountain and plays amateur hockey.

“It was very much worth it. As soon as I heard about [the trip], I knew I was in,” said Greg Mann, known as the Heat Miser for the flaming red-and-orange wig he wears to honor the old Atlanta Flames.

Cersosimo set up a similar trip two years ago and got 64 other fans to join her. The Thrashers won that game in a shootout. This time, she had 60 people signed up within two days of announcing the date when the schedule came out last summer. She bought 131 tickets in her first order.

“My Visa bill was $11,000 that month,” she said.

Fans were responsible for their own transportation. Before the game, they gathered at the Thrashers’ end of the ice, surprising the players with the highly unusual road support.

“I was thinking it might fire them up a bit more,” Cersosimo acknowledged.

Instead, the Thrashers had one of the worst first periods in a season that has had many. Carolina outshot Atlanta 21-4 in the first 20 minutes. Cullen’s goal came shorthanded, when he skated between Slava Kozlov and Mathieu Schneider, with neither one taking him. Whitney’s goal looked like another miscommunication, with Zach Bogosian coming up to help Schneider on the boards, leaving Whitney alone skating down the middle of the ice.

The Thrashers’ biggest problems, though, are on offense. They have been shut out in eight of the nine periods they have played since the All-Star break.