FOX's infamous 'glowing puck' is making a comeback ... kind of

Grab your Walkmans and copy of Nirvana’s “Nevermind” because we’re going back to the 1990’s this weekend.

Well, fans at the Staples Center attending the Kings-Oilers clash on Saturday will be, at least.

While the promotional evening in California will definitely feature plenty of fanny packs, frosted tips and Furbies, FOX Sports decided that they’d like to get in on the fun as well by bringing back the ‘glowing puck’ for portions of its broadcast of the game.

When it comes to polarizing sports-viewing technology, does it get any better than FoxTrax? FOX Sports debuted the technology during the 1996 All-Star Game and used it until 1998 in an attempt to help fans follow the puck during games. (Hockey is fast, you know.)

The results were glorious.

The blue glow around the puck along with that red line that traced shots were really something else. Whether you’re a fan or not, this augmented reality system will inspire FOX’s intermission coverage during Saturday’s contest.

“We won’t be able to give the speed of the shot,” FOX producer Steven Dorfman said to Kevin Allen of USA Today recently. “But we can simulate the glow of the puck, and we can simulate the tracking of the puck. Not live, but we will show some plays in the first and second intermissions, and maybe a couple of clips in-game and postgame on what it would look like if that technology still existed.”

Once this broadcast experiment was abandoned, the NHL no longer used pucks containing the shock sensors and infrared emitters that made television screens across North America light up like Clark Griswold’s house during the holidays. Therefore, what is seen on Saturday won’t be precisely like what it was in the past.

But then again, nothing really is anymore, right? Isn’t that the entire point of these nostalgia-themed evenings? Don’t they exist to remind us that things will never be as good as they used to be?

(‘Come As You Are’ by Nirvana begins to play as Stan gently sobs, despite the fact that he was born in 1995 and has no strong ties to the decade whatsoever.)

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