It’s a regular enough occurrence: two friends buy hockey season tickets together, but one can’t make Friday’s game. Would Friend A go alone? Maybe. It’s more likely that Friend A would invite Friend C to take Friend B’s ticket.

But not this year. No one besides the student who purchased season tickets to Gopher hockey games will be able to sit in that seat. Friend A might just have to go solo or not at all.

Season tickets are more affordable than single-game passes for students who plan to go to lots of games, even if they can’t make each one. But under this new policy, at the games they can’t make, the student section could be filled with empty seats, and that mass of shouting, fist-pumping students will shrink.

Not only that, but the amount of money spent at concessions and stands will decrease because of a smaller crowd.

This new policy is trivial. Students pay for the ticket, so they should be able to do what they want with it, whether it be resell it or give it to a friend. These kinds of restrictions don’t exist for any other University sport and it is legal to resell tickets.

If the University wants to ensure that only current students are using these tickets, the University should come up with a better way to monitor that, instead of making the fans and season ticket holders suffer. Perhaps the University could invest in more card scanners like those at the Recreation Center to check if people using student tickets are indeed students.

A system like this would keep the student section plump with rowdy students. And those of us who only get to games because a friend’s friend can’t go would still be able to catch a few games during the season.

The University shouldn’t try to dictate who true fans are. For one rare moment, the University seems to not be thinking about its bottom line in the money it will lose by not filling seats at every game.

But in this case, students who buy season tickets should be able to do what they want with them.