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If there was a saving grace to the Dallas Stars' painful but not entirely surprising loss to those cursed Red Wings on Thursday, it was the venue from which we watched it happen.

We joined hundreds of our Stars-crazed brethren for an outdoor watching party on that big courtyard outside American Airlines Center's front door – or, to use its proper corporate-sponsor title, AT&T Plaza.

The weather was perfect: clear, temperate, day shading toward twilight. Fans sat at the tables scattered around the plaza, or lolled in their toted-from-home lawn chairs.

The Stars' Ice Girls wheeled around on rollerblades, handing out free trinkets and inviting the sturdier-looking men to participate in a wing-eating contest (my husband gracefully declined).

There were no bad sightlines, with the massive, movie-theater-sized screens on three sides offering a larger-than-life view of the action.

The plaza felt like a comfortable living room, sheltered by streamlined office buildings to the right and left, the front facade of the arena ahead and the infinite sky above.

I know all this sounds a little poetic for what was, after all, a beer-and-hot-dog hockey evening. It was hard not to marvel, though, at this splendid gathering place – especially when you consider how close it came to never being built at all.

Ten years ago in this town's tumultuous political history is about three geologic ages ago. But in 1998, the comfortable plaza ringed by restaurants and crowded with happy hockey fans was an urban eyesore.

The spot where we pitched our lawn chairs and picnic rug used to sit nearly dead center of an industrial wasteland, a defunct power plant atop about 40,000 tons of contaminated dirt. It gave a major approach to downtown Dallas a defeated air, a sense that not very much was happening there and perhaps never would.

The reason for dredging up this history lesson is to point out how very nearly nothing did. We've been through some close and angry elections over the last decade, but the so-called arena referendum was in a class by itself.

After a fierce campaign, Dallas voters chose to subsidize arena construction by an infinitesimal 1,642 votes – a hair's-breadth 1.3 percent of the 125,000 votes cast.

At the time, I had mixed emotions. I still do: As with the arena opponents whose vote-no campaign was prosaically called "It's a Bad Deal!" it sticks in my craw that, in city after city, taxpayers are called on to help build shimmering sports palaces for rich team owners.

But as did the just-as-prosaic "Yes! Let's Build It" campaigners, I recognized that Dallas might not only risk losing two of its sports franchises, but might also pass on a shot at significant redevelopment if the measure failed.

It was a gamble, and a big one: $125 million in public money to be paid out of hotel and rent-car taxes to build the arena. And plenty of doubters flat did not believe developer (and then-Mavericks owner) Ross Perot Jr. when he said the center would be a catalyst for shops, restaurants, offices, apartments and hotels.

On Thursday, as I loafed in my lawn chair and wished for a goal, it occurred that Dallas might easily have missed this chance. The referendum, challenged by an underfunded but fiercely committed grassroots opposition, might have failed. And the market might not ever have been ripe for all that ancillary development.

Public confidence doesn't always pay off so handsomely. Developers' promises are not always kept; the most optimistic scenario isn't always the one that materializes.

But this time, Dallas gambled and won. We should always be so lucky.