Chase Stillman’s ‘Welcome to professional hockey’ life came close to 1 a.m. at the very beginning of Utica’s hockey season. For the first time he was living without any parents, or billet parents around. Just him and a roommate. Welcome to adulthood. Stillman’s roommate in Utica, Simon Nemec, walked into Chase’s room close to 12:30 a.m., much to Stillman’s surprise. “Chase, there’s someone in my room,” Stillman remembers Nemec saying. “I’m like, ‘What?’ so I wake up, I’m in my underwear, I have no idea what’s going on. I go over there (to Nemec’s room) with a stick.” Chase, slightly in disbelief at what was happening, asks Nemec again “Someone is in your room?” Nemec corrected himself, “No, there’s something.” Both Stillman and Nemec approach the bedroom door, Stillman saying he thinks it’s going to be a rat or something. Simon interjects, ‘No, something touched me’. So, it wasn’t a rat. “So, I wheel in there with my hockey stick and there’s a bat flying around,” Stillman can laugh now, with hindsight. “So then (Nemec) went to get a blanket, and he’s trying to run around and trap it in the room. I’m well, like, we gotta get this dude. We can’t sleep with it in here. “He gets a sheet and I don’t know what he’s going to do with it, whether he thinks he’s going to catch it, I ended up getting it out with a stick, so we had our first team bonding moment together, two or three days into living together at one in the morning, it was awesome. Welcome to living with each other!"