Concert History | Céline Dion at National Car Rental Center — A Concert Opened the Hockey Arena Six Days Before Its First Game

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On October 3, 1998, Céline Dion did more than add a Sunrise date to the Let's Talk About Love tour. Her concert opened the new National Car Rental Center to the public, six days before the Florida Panthers played their first regular-season game there.

The sequence matters because this was a hockey arena being commissioned through live music. The arena's official history says the building had been fast-tracked in 26 months for the fall 1998 hockey season, with nearly 500 workers installing 19,000 theater-style seats. The Florida Panthers Virtual Vault records an unusual September 5 pre-opening test: members of local Boys & Girls Clubs were invited to flush the plumbing before the building first opened for Dion's October 3 concert. Sources: https://www.amerantbankarena.com/arena-info/history and https://www.flapanthersvault.com/item/unique-invitation-for-a-flush-test-1998/

Together, those records make Dion's audience the first documented public-event load on the completed room—seating, entrances, services and concert operations together—rather than a rehearsal for the arena's anchor sport. Contemporary Associated Press reporting, preserved by The Washington Post, dates the Panthers' first regular-season game in the new arena to October 9 and describes the team as christening the building that night. The six-day gap fixes the concert's place in the venue's operating history without using a later tour film or set list as evidence. Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/sports/1998/10/10/vanbiesbrouck-blanks-rangers-in-flyers-debut/4886e1c4-5fbb-483e-80de-6ad797dc99c5/

The historical name is National Car Rental Center; the same building is now Amerant Bank Arena. The pin at 26.158370, -80.325429 represents the arena footprint. It reconciles the OpenStreetMap-derived venue center shown by Mapy (26.158370, -80.325429) with Wikidata's independent point (26.158333, -80.325556), about 13 metres away: https://mapy.com/en/?id=1072343908&source=osm and https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q795526. Precision radius: ±160 metres, covering the arena bowl and attached entrances—not an undocumented 1998 stage position or the September plumbing-test route.

Cover image: Christophe95, “BB&T Center (Sunrise),” photographed April 5, 2015; own work, CC BY-SA 4.0: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:BB%26T_Center_(Sunrise).JPG. The photograph shows the later arena exterior under its BB&T Center name. It does not depict Céline Dion, the October 3, 1998 concert, or the building's opening-day configuration.