FOXBOROUGH — Hockey, like revenge, is best served cold.

For the NHL’s Winter Classic, it’s best dished out with a side order of snow, too. But those fairytale flurries arrived slightly behind schedule on New Year’s Day, some two hours after the Bruins and Canadiens wrapped up their hockey holiday in front of 67,246 appreciative (for the most part) lovers of all things slip ’n’ fall.

Sure, most who journeyed to Route 1 would have felt better had the Bruins been on the right side of the 5-1 score. Which is to say that Gillette Stadium and TD Garden were linked at the hipcheck on Friday, because no one among the thousands and thousands who showed up sporting Black-and-Gold knit caps and sweaters left happy about the result.

In fact, no one in Black and Gold could have been amused by the home team’s effort, start to finish. Les Habs left happy. The Bruins arrived Les Miserables and left the same. At least the temperature was right: high 30s for most of the afternoon, though the Bruins’ game never made it beyond lukewarm.

All in all, strictly as an event, the NHL has nailed the Classic to near perfection since its debut in 2008. It has turned the near miracle of dropping a game-fit 200-by-85-foot ice sheet in the great outdoors into a pro forma task. Provided its crew isn’t hindered by days of driving rain or an unrelenting blizzard, the NHL requires only 7-8 days to put up its paradise in a parking lot of choice.

And voila, the Kraft family’s green acres worked wonderfully. Over two days, just less than 110,000 hockey-mad fans came streaming down Route 1 and rollicked in the festivities. So much land. So much open space. So many people. In Boston, we’re always accustomed to doing our best, making do with small spaces and often small minds. We get handed an open tableau like the expansive site of a former harness track and we can get a little lost.

Not so this time. The site worked. The construction and ice surface performed right to textbook specs. There was not a single stop in play for the ice crew to be summoned to fix a chip, crack, or open patch. Maybe that escaped much of the crowd, because we’ve come to expect such efficiencies in our smartphone lifestyles. But it would not have escaped anyone who ever has tried even so much as to freeze a 16-by-24-foot patch in the backyard. For those of us who have tried, we know, making outdoor ice is a living hell.

What this event will never get right, however, is the scale of the mind’s eye for watching hockey. Whether the sheet is dropped in a ballpark (Fenway 2010), or football stadium, it forever will be an awkward, if not impossible, fit in terms of an even serviceable “in-arena’’ viewing experience.

Think of it this way: Everything about the indoor game, from size of playing surface to the total number of players on the ice (a dozen, max) serves as the furniture to fill a mythical 1,700-square-foot, three-bedroom Cape.

When all of that is packed and loaded for an outdoor arena, for 35,000, 70,000, or more fans to witness, it’s still only enough furniture to fill a three-bedroom Cape. Rooms are left empty. The comfy couch looks lost in the massive family room. Intimacy is lost.

Even the many good seats at Gillette, those high enough in the stadium to offer full view of the sheet of ice, were too distant from the surface to make for a great viewing experience. Fenway had far fewer of those good seats, but at least a few thousand offered spectacular views. In that sense, baseball and hockey are about the same fit at the 104-year-old Fens.

For those in attendance here, the only items that truly stood out were the massive flags, Canadian and American, unfurled on the ice during the pregame ceremony. As eye candy goes, that’s not so bad. But once play began, the game disappeared, and that is true of every Winter Classic. It’s a transition sport, the root of which is a tiny puck, with everyone in the stands too far away to know or follow what the heck is happening.

TV viewing of the game is different, of course. The Classic is a made-for-TV event, created by former NHL executive John Collins. Those who attend are best to think of it that way, too. They become the live, gigantic studio audience, dropped into a large bowl, and the rink and players are truly playing to the camera and the many watching in the comfort of their three-bedroom Capes.

But there is no denying that the entire Classic event is a celebration of the sport, which is why it continues to be a fan success and huge dollar draw.

By now, hockey fans must realize they aren’t paying to see a game, but rather to be among friends on New Year’s Day and talk some hockey, live it, share it. It’s about community and friendship and swapping tales of games watched, players loved, road trips made, best nachos consumed, and all the other itsy-bitsy intersections we share when a certain sport takes root in the center of our being.

Like the calendar year we just put to rest, another Winter Classic has come and gone in the Hub of Hockey. For most who attended, and for many who watched, chapter No. 910 in the Habs-Bruins tales was something to forget.

But we have weathered such winters in the past, only to return undaunted. It’s hockey, and that’s what we do here.

Kevin Paul Dupont can be reached at kevin.dupont@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @GlobeKPD.