It's the end of an era in Calgary.
The Flames open their farewell season at the Scotiabank Saddledome on Thursday, hosting the Seattle Kraken. It's their 44th and final season in the building before they move across the street to the $1.2-billion Scotia Place.
There's already a date circled: Saturday, April 10, 2027, against the Vancouver Canucks. It's the last game on the Flames' regular-season schedule at the Saddledome. Only a playoff run gets them past it.
Before it goes, here's how Calgary built it.
It went up in just over 26 months
Construction started on July 29, 1981.
Just over 26 months later, in October 1983, the building opened with the Flames hosting the Edmonton Oilers. A Battle of Alberta, right out of the gate.
Until then, the Flames had played their first three Calgary seasons across the street at the Stampede Corral, which held about 7,000 people.
Tim Hunter, a Calgarian drafted by the then-Atlanta Flames in 1979, watched the new arena rise on his way to practice.
"I had so many buddies that were in the construction business that were working on the Saddledome," he told CalgaryFlames.com. "I'd get a wave or a whistle from one of my buddies growing up, a pipe-fitter, plumber or some sort of construction guy. 'Hey Hunts, how ya doin? Just bangin' away on this Saddledome, here!'"
"Every day you'd get to see little bits of it get more and more put together, and just morph out of the ground into this beautiful, new building that we were going to play in."
The roof works like a tennis racket
The famous curved roof was the hard part.
It's a cable-supported, tension-ring design. Art Froese, a former Calgary Stampeders halfback who chaired the construction committee for the Calgary Olympic Coliseum Society, explained it to the Calgary Herald in December 1981.
"The cable system is inherently failsafe. It's like a tennis racket," he said. "All these cables crisscross and there's enough of them so that even if you had a failure in one cable, the roof isn't going to fail."
Once the cables were up, the roof was cast in concrete. "It acts just like the shell of a turtle," he said.
The arena was designed by Calgary's GEC Architecture.
"It's always exciting for an architect to be part of that kind of community-making project," Andrew Tankard, a partner at the firm, told CalgaryFlames.com.
The same builder is working on Scotia Place
The Saddledome was built by Cana Construction, which had about 300 tradespeople on site by spring 1983. More than four decades later, Cana is also building Scotia Place.
The site wasn't entirely closed off. Fans kept showing up to find their future seats.
"We get a lot of people saying 'Can I come down and see where my seat is?'" construction manager Bert Seedhouse told the Herald in 1983. "We felt we would be good guys for a while and we let a few in to look at their seats."
Cana eventually restricted access. Its hard hats kept disappearing.
It almost had a very different name
The building was originally called the Olympic Coliseum, built with the 1988 Winter Olympics in mind.
In 1982, the Calgary Herald ran a naming contest. Most entries had what the paper called a "rugged western flair," but a few went elsewhere, including the Calympiad, the New Corral and the Southlands Coliseum, a dig at the Oilers' Northlands Coliseum in Edmonton.
It became the Olympic Saddledome, after the shape of its roof. It was slated to open with 17,400 seats, with another 2,600 added ahead of the 1988 Games.
The last scheduled game sold out in minutes
Forty-three years later, everyone wants one more night in the building.
When single-game tickets went on sale at the end of August, the April 10 game against Vancouver was gone almost immediately. Jordan Jullian set an alarm and sat in the online queue for 30 minutes before the sale opened.
"I was one minute in and all the tickets were sold," she told Global News. "I was actually in shock."
Resale listings went up just as fast, from about $500 to nearly $1,500. Consumer protection experts warned that kind of demand also draws scammers.
Our coverage of the sellout is here.
There are still plenty of chances to get in before April. Calgary has 42 regular-season home games, plus two home preseason games. Big dates include the defending Stanley Cup champion Carolina Hurricanes on Oct. 18, and the Saddledome's last two editions of the Battle of Alberta on March 3 and March 23.
Can the Flames extend the farewell?
A playoff run is the only way the Saddledome sees Flames games after April 10.
It's a steep climb. Last season the Flames went 34-39-9, finished 29th of 32 teams and scored the fewest goals in the NHL. They've missed the playoffs four straight years.
Captain Mikael Backlund, 37, signed an extension through 2028, so he'll be part of both the last season here and the first at Scotia Place. He knows how he'd like the old building to go out.
"I would love to finish off the Saddledome with a playoff," he said. "Going into playoffs having a big game late in the season clinching playoffs, that would be really cool."
One man wants a souvenir
Hunter watched his friends build the Saddledome, then played nine seasons in it and won the Stanley Cup there in 1989.
When it comes down, there's one piece he'd like to take home.
"I'm petitioning that when they tear the Saddledome down, that I get the penalty box, 'cause I spent 2,405 minutes in there for the Calgary Flames."
Sources
Birth of the Saddledome: Piece By Piece, Calgary Flames, September 28, 2026
Calgary Flames, 2026-27 schedule and Farewell Season information
Comments from Tim Hunter and Andrew Tankard, and historic Calgary Herald interviews with Art Froese and Bert Seedhouse, as reported by CalgaryFlames.com. Season details and comments from Mikael Backlund as reported by The Canadian Press. Ticket sale details and comments from Jordan Jullian as reported by Global News.
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