So…what does this have to do with the hockey you ask?  Well, as it turns out, this most embarrassing movement took place when my daughter and a neigbourhood friend recently attended the hockey game of this friend’s mother.

For some reason I cannot remember, these two young ladies needed to visit the dressing room of the ladies team.  As my daughter describes it, they went down the long hall containing all the dressing room doors to the one where the friend’s mother’s team was preparing for battle.  My daughter was sure the correct dressing room was the one with the red key in the door and her compadre was sure it was a different one.

The latter door was the one they chose to open and things headed south quite quickly at that point.  If you’ve ever been inside the dressing room at any hockey rink, and given that this particular blog is written by one who writes as an old-timer, my guess is that you’re already forming a visual of how this post-game interview went down.  This was not the standard Daniel-Alfredson-on-the-bike-in-his-under-armour. Nope, this went down way less pretty than that.

Not sure if there is any clearer way to describe the scene than this:  Old Ugly Naked Guys.

My daughter claims her and her buddy screeched and quickly tried to shield their eyes from damage, as one might in the event of a solar flare or thermo-nuclear detonation.  And to be fair to the Old Ugly Naked Guys, they too reacted – one apparently yelled “Whoa!” in a half scared, half threatened, half violated, half surprised sort of tone.

The girls predictably ran like scared rabbits.  Off to the other room.  It was made more horrible by the fact that this happened before the friend’s mother’s game even began.  The young ladies actually sat through that game on the bench of the mother’s team.  There is security in closeness to loved ones to be sure and this situation called for all of that.  They literally kept their heads down in the arena until they went home for fear of seeing one of the aforementioned Old Ugly Naked Guys.

I’m sure the old boys weren’t quite as scarred for life by the experience.  There were likely one or two who  got nailed with more ridicule than some of the others.  No doubt the ones with the least equipment on, the ones with the longest history of female problems, etc. etc.

The old hockey adage “keep your stick on the ice” can be used to sum up the moral of most hockey stories. However, I’m not sure it applies here.

It actually looked like there were spares waiting for their shift although I didn’t stay long enough to see if they came on at some point.  It was just a good old game of shinny, university students I’m guessing by the age of them.

The interesting thing was, they had a unique way of setting up a net which I’m ashamed to admit I have never seen before.  I first noticed it when one guy beat the last defenceman close to the end of the rink and then sent the puck skittering towards the goal.  I saw it hit one post, which was a boot, and send it sliding about 5 feet away.  However, when they put the boot back in position, I couldn’t see the other post (boot) and realized at that point, they were only using one.  This was kind of like having to shoot and hit iron when you play on a real rink with no goalie.

Another example of Canadian innovation at its finest.

If you used a wrist shot, and could control the friction they generated against something other than ice, you could get off a decent shot.  Slapshots were like pushing on a string.  You really had to have a cannon to make it move with a slapshot.   Once airborne, the sponge puck became the ultimate flying weapon.  No one knew where it was going, how it would curve or drop or rise into the wind as if taking off from a carrier deck.  If by chance it was a the proverbial ground ball in the infield, things got even worse.  You pretty much had to wait until it stopped bouncing before playing it again.

However, I do remember playing full games with just such a beast on open air rinks on a winter afternoon.  It had it’s advantages there.  Without shin pads, a real puck usually resulted in a least a few stingers.  It moved better on ice and for the half-equipped goalies, you could lean into it without fear of hurting him.

The ultimate humour in the sponge puck was when it would inevitably get switched for a real one (ie. it got lost in a snowbank, the kid who owned it had to go home, someone was just plain tired of using it, etc.).  In such situations, etiquette (yes, it does exist in hockey) demanded that a warning be issued to the gang that a switch had been made.  However, someone would always forget or not hear the warning and fire off a pass or pull the trigger on a shot assuming they were still playing with blanks causing the rest to dive for cover knowing we had gone back to live ammo.  Ah good times.

What a wonderful year that year of Pee-Wee was.  Coaches Ed and Brian made coming to the rink tons of fun.  Don’t remember a ton about that year but do remember we were pretty strong all season and the finals were against Northminister, a neighbourhood rival that we took down two straight in a best of three.   Hmmmm….or was that minor bantam?  Gad, the years do get blurry as one gets older.

Ok, that’s just bluster.  There will be no fans and it’s a relatively new rink with steel girders instead of rafters.  While there are still some wooden sticks, we all wear helmets, some wear mouth guards and our goalies have heavier garb than Darth Vader.  Protection is as important now as it was when we were 16 and so while some of us have some old school equipment (grade 10 shoulder pads still exist in this bloke’s hockey bag), most of us strap ourselves into safe gear relatively tightly.  In fact, I heard one WOHL’er say to another as the other poured a whole role of tape around both his legs before Thursday night’s game “What – are you afraid you’re going to fall apart out there!?”

Lastly, we all pretty much all get along as we have to share the chicken wings afterwards at the Central, especially in light of Duncan’s concern that Webbie just never orders enough wings, the dominant topic of conversation in the blue team’s dressing room since approximately Thanksgiving weekend.  So here’s to Monday night.  The Blue team is ready to change it’s strategy by attempting to score first in all three games since we all know in a 15 minute game in the W, it’s kinda like sudden death from the drop of the first puck.  Game On!

Check out the footage of red vs. white as well.  If you have your volume up loud enough and your hearing aid in, you can hear Farrell shouting at someone to get the puck on the net very early on in this clip.  Kudo’s to white’s goalie who stacks the pads part way through and gets a huge roar from the crowd…er…someone.

I’m old enough to have watched Orr, I grew up on a steady diet of Gretzky highlight reels and I know the Islanders are a weak team.   But is it possible Sid is the best player to have ever played the game?

There skated a team whose sweaters were blue,

But when their wins totalled four,

They could keep score no more,

_____ _____ ____ __ ____ ___ ___!

With 30 seconds to go, we couldn’t decide whether to pull our goalie or not.  I thought we were tied.  The other team thought they were ahead by one.  As we shook hands afterwards, they felt the final was 7-6.  Our goalie Mark counted only 6 behind him.  Across the board, our guys were sure we had 6.  With 6 behind Mark and 6 for us, the consensus was that we had tied.  Trouble was, we could only find 5 goals for in our dressing room after the game.

I ran into Fulch, their goalie on the way out to the car after the game.   An honest man who claimed we definitely pumped 6 by him…but that they scored 7.  Damn goalies.   Can’t trust ‘em…but when in doubt, go with your own guy for goals against and their guy for goals for.  At least in this situation.

We think the red team made an illegal change in the last couple of minutes so if the truth is that they were leading by 1, we want the penalty shot we were owed at end of game to give us a chance to tie it.  If we were actually tied…this could actually be for the win.   But then, if they were up by 2, as Warmington thought…