SALT LAKE CITY — About three minutes into the second period of Thursday night’s NHL matchup between the Utah Mammoth and Vegas Golden Knights, a loud minority of fans in gold rose to its feet inside the Delta Center and praised superstar centerman Jack Eichel for putting his team on the board.

Nineteen seconds later, the same fans stood and waved their Golden Knights towels, as the team took a 2-0 lead. At 13:22, Mammoth defenseman Nate Schmidt found the back of the net, and the goal horn sounded. This time, the home crowd roared and shouted “Hey!” along with the team’s goal song while Vegas fans sulked.

Somewhere between the second and third goals of the night, a fight between Utah’s Jack McBain and Vegas’ Keegan Kolesar broke out, and everyone stood and yelled.

Sports craze people. All around the Delta Center on Thursday, there were babies in Mammoth jerseys and earmuffs and older fans in Golden Knights apparel. Before the game, a blue mammoth named Tusky skated around in the spotlight, and during the national anthem the home crowd yelled “O say can YO(U) see,” shortly followed by Vegas fans shouting “gave proof through the (K)NIGHT.”

What’s the point? Why do people adhere to these odd rituals? And where do these allegiances come from?

For most, it’s location. The loud minority at the Delta Center probably didn’t travel all the way from western Nevada, yet presumably pledged loyalty to the Golden Knights — the closest NHL team by proximity since 2017 — prior to the Mammoth’s arrival in 2024. For those supporting Utah on Thursday, most fans probably lived in the greater Salt Lake area.

But not all cities and states have teams to root for. Wyomingites in particular know that, living in a sort of sports team desert. So who do they support and why? Do they pull for their neighbors in Utah or Colorado? Or do they swim upstream and choose their own team for whatever reason? And what are those reasons?

Fans who grow up in Teton County tend to affiliate with neighboring teams that have been around the longest, such as the Denver Broncos and Colorado Rockies. But most people have moved here from somewhere else, and brought their sports allegiances with them.

One of the biggest determinants is favorite players.

James Doyle, 26, grew up in Jackson, attended the University of Wyoming and now plays for the Jackson Hole Moose hockey team. No one on either side of his family had an interest in hockey, but he and his brother began playing and following the sport at a young age.

In the 2004 NHL entry draft, the Washington Capitals selected a young Russian phenom named Alexander Ovechkin, who quickly set the league ablaze with his hard-shooting and hard-hitting style of play. As a young consumer, Doyle was drawn to Ovechkin’s electric approach to the game and became a Capitals fan.

When he was 9 years old, Doyle traveled to Washington, D.C., with his brother who was there for USA Hockey Nationals, and they attended a game at the Verizon Center. Doyle was in awe of the atmosphere and remembers the city embracing the team’s “Rock the Red” campaign with its bright new jerseys.

“It was such a moment of joy as a little kid, and then I think you kind of make a natural emotional connection in your head to that experience,” Doyle said.

Years later, after experiencing heartbreak in the playoffs every spring, Doyle found himself at Cutty’s watching the Capitals play Vegas in game five of the 2018 Stanley Cup Finals. Because the finals were played in June, Doyle was at home instead of school, where he had watched Washington advance past the Columbus Blue Jackets, defending champions Pittsburgh Penguins and the Tampa Bay Lightning.

Every TV had the game on, and with every goal the Capitals scored Doyle yelled louder. Washington won the game 4-3, and with it, for the first time in the organization’s history, the coveted Stanley Cup. Doyle watched with his father and brother, and although they weren’t necessarily fans of the team, they were happy for Doyle. So was the rest of the bar.

“It felt like Cutty’s, for a moment, was a Capitals bar,” Doyle said.

Around the same time, Logan Cooley, the current rising star centerman for the Mammoth, celebrated his favorite team as well. Cooley grew up in Pittsburgh but was drawn instantly to Ovechkin, just as Doyle was.

“It wasn’t the easiest thing,” Cooley said in an interview Thursday after the team’s morning skate. “It’s not like I hated the Penguins or anything like that. I still loved them and watched them. I was just a big Ovechkin fan growing up and loved watching him play, and I just started to follow the Caps.”

It’s a scenario Rowan Weurdeman, a big Penguins fan from Jackson, wouldn’t approve of. See, in 2005, he chose to root for the NHL’s other young hotshot, Sidney Crosby.

Also a hockey player, Weurdeman attended Nationals in Cleveland one year and drove the 135 miles to Pittsburgh to watch the Penguins play. They won, and although Weurdeman sat in the nosebleeds, seeing Crosby’s speed in person was indelible.

Weurdeman has family in the eastern part of Pennsylvania, closer to Philadelphia, but “I’m not rooting for Philly,” he said. “I don’t want to.” Along with the Penguins, he now roots for the Steelers and Pirates.

“I see myself as allegiant to nobody just because I was born in an area with no sports,” Weurdeman said. “There’s no state sports team, there’s nothing. So, I feel like I can go wherever.”

One of Wyoming’s most popular players is Josh Allen, former quarterback for the University of Wyoming and reigning National Football League MVP for the Buffalo Bills in New York.

While in Laramie, Allen led the Cowboys to two consecutive eight-win seasons, an appearance in the Mountain West Championship game in 2016 and two bowl games. Across his career at Wyoming, Allen accounted for 57 touchdowns and 5,833 total yards of offense. In 2016 he earned second team All-Mountain West Conference honors and honorable mention in 2017.

In the 2018 NFL Draft, the Bills selected him at seventh overall, along with what now seems like the entire state of Wyoming.

On Saturday at War Memorial Stadium, the university retired Allen’s No. 17 — the first time in program history a player has received such an honor — and Wyoming was there to support its adopted child from California. Gates opened two hours before kickoff, and fans in blue and white, beside their friends in brown and gold, yelled his name as the bigger-than-life figure wandered around the sidelines taking photos and signing hats, posters and jerseys.

“I’m so honored and blessed to represent this university and this beautiful state,” Allen said during the halftime ceremony. “I love you guys. Thank you. God bless. Go Pokes. And it will always suck to be a CSU Ram.”

Since Allen’s NFL debut, Jackson has had its own Buffalo Bills hub at Eleanor’s bar on West Broadway. Every week, members of “Bills Mafia” gather there in their No. 17 jerseys surrounded by other Buffalo memorabilia.

Two weeks ago, the Bills hosted a Wyoming-themed home game against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, where the University of Wyoming was the official sponsor. Upon entering the stadium, fans received a sticker that depicted half of a No. 17 Wyoming jersey and half of a Bills jersey.

Jackson native and Bills fan Molly Pickerill says the union between Buffalo and Wyoming just makes sense.

“No one cares who you are, what you have, where you’re from,” she said. “It’s almost like one big family, which I always thought was unique to Wyoming because we’re so small. But then Buffalo is way bigger, and they have that mentality as well, so I think it’s almost like a family culture.”

Family is another important factor in deciding which sports teams to root for in a state with no sports teams.

Grace Parker, who grew up in Jackson, is a dedicated Boston fan because before moving to Wyoming her family lived in New England. Her earliest childhood memory is watching the 2004 World Series between the Boston Red Sox and St. Louis Cardinals — a seismic event for New Englanders, as the Sox won their first title since 1918.

In 2018, when Parker was at the University of Vermont, the Red Sox won the World Series again, and ahead of the parade on Halloween, she called her dad asking permission to skip school.

“Are you kidding me?” he told her. “I never got to go to one of those. You absolutely have to.”

Over the years, she and Doyle have had a friendly rivalry going, with the latter a big Yankees fan. Doyle’s mother and her family are from New Jersey, and his cousins live in New York City. They’re all fans of the baseball team in the Bronx, so he adopted them as well. It helps him stay in touch with his extended family, although it may distance him from other baseball fans.

“It’s a good way to, especially when I’m out here, stay connected with that part of the family and talk Yanks,” Doyle said. “It’s kind of fun that we have that. It’s us versus the world. Everyone hates the Yankees.”

On the other side of the family, Doyle’s father came from Wisconsin, so the Packers are their favorite team. Doyle has gone through Aaron Rodgers, Davante Adams, Christian Watson, James Jones and Jordan Love jerseys, and one of his earliest memories of sports fandom was rooting against Packers legend Brett Favre when he signed with their divisional rivals, the Minnesota Vikings. Just as the Yankees connect him with his cousins out East, the Packers have always been a link between him and his father.

“It was just a great way to bond with him,” Doyle said.

The only Packers game Doyle has seen in person was against the Denver Broncos at Mile High Stadium, a locale that longtime Jacksonite Bill Wiley is quite familiar with.

Wiley grew up on Wiley Lane near Teton Village but has family between Laramie and Granby, Colorado. Both sides have been Broncos fans forever.

In 1998 when the Broncos won their first Super Bowl against Doyle’s Packers, Wiley recalls celebrating with the greatest fan he has ever known, his grandmother Polly.

“I remember going back into the recesses of the old Horse Creek Station bar and having the best celebration cry ever with my grandma,” Wiley said.

Although Denver didn’t win the Super Bowl in 2012, the Broncos’ first playoff game against Weurdeman’s Steelers that year is another moment that replays in Wiley’s head. The game went into overtime, and on the first play of the extra period Tim Tebow hit Demaryius Thomas on a slant route, and the wide receiver ran 80 yards for the game-winning touchdown.

Wiley watched with his late brother, and the next morning he woke up unsure of why his right hand was so swollen. His brother reminded him that it was from all of the “high-octane high fives.”

Wiley’s other allegiance is to the Atlanta Braves, which represents a whole other reason for fandom: chance.

His childhood home was within one of the last sections of town to get cable, and during the summer every Braves game was broadcast. In 1982, Atlanta won its first 13 games of the season, and Wiley was hooked.

Wiley’s baseball fanatic son Tate began his life as a Red Sox fan — just like Parker, as Tate’s mother is from the East Coast — but “once he was mature enough to handle the truth, he finally joined me on the Braves side,” Wiley said.

Because Wyoming is barren of professional teams, any reason to root for anybody is acceptable. Parker has a friend who became a Miami Dolphins fan because they thought it was a cool animal. Young Jackson hockey player Stan Mosynets roots for the Golden Knights because he thought their logo was cool. Jackson Hole native Shayne Hansen is a Washington Commanders supporter because in 1992 when all of his friends were rooting for the Bills in the Super Bowl, he went the other way simply out of spite. Now his children are Washington fans, as well.

Obstinence, familial ties, proximity, favorite players, superficiality: These are the “hows” of Wyoming fandom, but the “whys” are significantly more important.

Especially in a state like Wyoming or a town like Jackson, where individual sports pit athletes against each other, team sports bring people together. Last weekend, former classmates from the University of Wyoming returned to Laramie for Allen’s jersey retirement. Throughout the summer, Doyle and Parker get together and watch the Yankees and Red Sox. This Christmas, Wiley and Tate will travel to Kansas City to watch the Chiefs play their beloved Broncos.

As simple and trivial as they might seem, sports bridge late family members and friends, states and societies. They provide “Where were you?” moments that last a lifetime.

So, who cares if someone questions your allegiances? Cheer on.

“It’s cool to like things,” Doyle said. “If you’re going to like things, go all in. Have interests. That’s my whole mentality on life. Don’t be embarrassed to like things.”