LORELAI: It’ll be fun. There’ll be cheerleaders and clowns, people doing the wave.
RORY: You have no idea what a hockey game is, do you?
The wave (known as the Mexican wave or the stadium wave outside North America) is an audience participation move where successive groups of spectators briefly stand, yell, and raise their arms. Immediately upon stretching to full height, the spectator returns to the usual seated position.
The result is a wave of standing spectators that travels through the crowd, even though individual spectators never move away from their seats.
It first appeared at a hockey game in Denver in 1979, a move claimed to be invented, then perfected, by professional cheerleader Krazy George Henderson. It began to be adopted internationally after broadcast coverage of the 1986 FIFA World Cup in Mexico, leading to the act being known as a “Mexican wave” in some countries.
The Annotated Gilmore Girls 