By: Brayden Fengler / January 8, 2026 I’ll be the first to admit that the title to this article is wordy. But this is a unique kind of bizarre and somewhat amusing story that is hard to condense into a title that makes any kind of sense. Please bear with me.
After three attempts, Trent (co-creator, co-writer on this very website) finally picked up his phone midway through the Canucks vs. Bruins game on January 3, 2026. I was calling him from inside Rogers Arena.
“I’ve got some bad news,” I say.
Immediately, without contemplation, he knows.
“Our card is gone,” he says.
I paused and sent him a picture of a washroom mirror at Rogers Arena. It was a type of picture that we had each taken dozens of times over nearly a decade. But this time, one thing was missing. As Trent correctly guessed, what was missing was, in fact, an old business card of ours, promoting a podcast that we created and co-hosted together between 2016 and 2017.
At a Canucks game that we had both attended during the 2016-17 season, we had slipped a few of these cards into empty laminate frames that were adhered to the mirrors of one of the men’s washrooms at Rogers Arena. Although we would’ve never guessed it at the time, those cards would stay there for years. Now, the last one is finally gone.
The podcast that the business cards were promoting was one of Trent’s and my earlier ventures together, prior to this website. It was a hockey and geek culture podcast called “The Scratched Podcast”.
We put out new episodes every week for a total of 74 episodes. Over that time, we interviewed Dom Luszczyszyn during his early Athletic days, Ken Boehlke of Sinbin.Vegas, the year that Vegas entered the league, and the developers of the video game “Bush League Hockey“. Mostly though we produced many episodes of just the two of us prattling back and forth at each other.
It never became much in the grand scheme of what would be considered podcast success, but the whole experiment is something that I’m still extremely proud of to this day.
We were proud of it at the time as well, so much so that we had these business cards printed out with our logo. The logo was a top-down view of an Art Ross-style hockey net, meant to look like a pair of glasses with hockey sticks crossed behind it.
Honestly, that logo (which someone far more talented made for us) may still be the best thing we have ever been associated with.
I can’t recall exactly when we got these cards made or what game we first left them at Rogers Arena, but the earliest photo that we both have of one of these cards prominently displayed on the mirror of a Rogers Arena washroom is from March 9th 2017. On that day, the Canucks played and lost to the New York Islanders 3-4 in overtime.
Now, why did we do this? Simply put, the cost of producing these cards was our only marketing budget for the podcast, and leaving them in locations vaguely relevant to the topics of the podcast was our only marketing strategy.
So places like bulletin boards in coffee shops or menus at restaurants were prime real estate for leaving a card and reaching our next prospective listener. So an empty, clear display frame, accessible only via a paper-thin opening at its top, was too tempting a business opportunity to pass up.
It would ultimately be 3-4 cards that were dropped into these frames, all within just the one washroom. As with any of our gorilla marketing campaigns, when it was mission accomplished, and all cards fell perfectly into place, we knew that the life cycle of the cards being as we had left them would be short.
We assumed that even a thumbnail-sized but plainly visible promotional smear on an otherwise mirrored surface would not last long in such a busy building. The next time a promotional flyer needed to be displayed, surely our card would be gone or at least covered; we were just lucky to be in that room at a time when the frames were empty.
That assumption of ours ended up being wrong. As far as we can now tell, for the better part of a decade, those clear frames on the surface of those mirrors in that one Rogers Arena washroom have served no other purpose but to hold Scratched Podcast business cards.
The business cards remained, long after our final episode of “The Scratch Podcast” dropped in December of 2017. Every time Trent or I went back to Rogers Arena for a Canucks game, or another event we would laugh under our breaths at the absurdity of those cards remaining. They remained as they were, year after year, after year, at eye level, visible to every person practicing proper hygiene after their mid-game washroom visit.
Over the years, a few of the cards did get removed, but one card remained for many years on its own. During COVID, we were certain that it was likely the end for the one lonesome remnant of our podcasting career. If ever there was a time when an establishment may have an opportunity to do some extra spring cleaning, it would be during a global pandemic.
But to our surprise, upon returning to Rogers Arena when the world had settled back into its new normal, that one card remained untouched. The card still posed the same question that it had for years to anyone who happened to see it, “What the hell is The Scratched Podcast?”
It had been there for so long that to us it began to feel less like a novelty and more like a constant. After all those years, it had blended in to the same category as the stalls, the counters and the mirrors themselves, as permanent fixtures of that room.
What has always fascinated me about this the most, is that it’s not like the card existed under a seat or, in a crack in the boards, this last remaining card was still in a highly visible location. For 41 Canucks home games a season and at every concert or other event in the building, hundreds of people would’ve come within inches of this card while washing their hands or checking their hair. Yet it remained.
One might also think that where one card, sticker or trinket is left, others may follow, simply due to human nature. Once the possibility of simply dropping something in there is on full display, maybe some other items may join the fun, like as in graffiti on train cars or stickers on a ski lift. But no, despite the ease with which that card got there, it remained the sole tenant of that display frame for the majority of its time.
For a brief moment, we had at one point in 2021 dropped a sticker of our StadiumChinatown.ca logo, with the backing still on, down into the display case of the lone remaining card. Yet that sticker was removed within the year it was placed there. Surprisingly, the original Scratched Podcast card stayed where it always had.
So, when I walked into that washroom on January 3rd of this year and noticed it was gone, I was not immediately surprised. Every time I would round the corner into that washroom, my initial assumption before setting my eyes on the mirror was that it would be gone. It always felt right that the last card was still there, but I always expected it to be gone.
Now that it is not there anymore, I can’t lie, I’m sad that it is gone. That building has housed so many amazing memories for people, and yet so many of those same people have passed through it, leaving a mark no bigger than a scuff on the floor.
So I’ll admit that selfishly I enjoyed that there was something tangible within those walls that was essentially a time capsule and something that said “hey, this is proof that I’ve been here too”.
The story of this podcast business card strikes a similar chord for me as another, more, shall we say, “invited” way that I once had a physical reminder of my mark on a place. As many schools have done over the years, when I was in grade 5, my elementary school had the whole student body paint their own wooden fish. The fish would ultimately be displayed along a chain-link fence near the school’s playground.
I painted my fish like a Canadian flag. It went up on the fence, and for years, these fish remained on that fence by that playground. I went through all of middle school, and the fish were still there. I started high school, then finished high school, and still, although other students would’ve come and gone from that elementary school, my fish and those of my classmates from that era remained on that fence.
I’m 31 now, and it was only a couple of years ago, when driving down the road, passing my old elementary school, that I noticed the fish on the fence were gone. Eventually, I saw that they were replaced by new fish, no doubt from new kids, and so life goes on.
Both in the case of that fish and the card, had they disappeared within a week or even a year of their placement, by now there is a good chance that I wouldn’t have even remembered that they were there in the first place.
But in both circumstances, they persisted longer than they should have. Despite the physical objects themselves holding zero value, their significance grew as personal landmarks or as fingerprints frozen in time.
I always knew that one day the fish would come down and that one day the last card would be plucked out of the display. But for the longest time, it didn’t happen. And there’s something about that that puts a smile on my face.
Am I making a big deal over a piece of paper? No doubt. But that paper was put there almost a decade ago, and as is always the case in life, a lot has changed in my life since then. The card was a constant reminder of the years gone by, of a harmless and juvenile thing that my best friend and I once did when we were younger than we are now.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there are other little insignificant objects stuck to walls or behind certain corners inside of Rogers Arena or buildings like it. Things that mean something to someone, but nothing to everyone else.
So, for anyone who may have left their own little mark in a place important to them, whatever your equivalent podcast business card is, I hope it stays where it is, for as long as it can. I hope that each time you see it, it gives you the same amusement as seeing that card did for me, for all of those years.
p.s. I do want to say as well, that given the number of years that this “story” spans and the fact that there were at multiple points, cards in more than one display, there is a not 0% chance that I missed seeing a card last time I was at Rogers on Jan 3rd… I’m fairly confident that the cards are, in fact, now all gone. But if someone has seen one recently and can prove me wrong, I’d be happy to hear it!