Spring is encroaching on Washington, but not New England. Not yet. Friday afternoon I passed an ice fisherman in southern Massachusetts and a lone pond hockey player in Nashua, New Hampshire. Knowing such conditions were likely, I packed an Easton hockey stick and my gloves and skates. It was torture passing the snow-crusted banks of the Nashua pond without pulling over -- that lone skater needed a passing buddy -- but it was already 5:15 Friday evening and I'd driven straight from Maryland without a meal, stopping only for fuel. Faceoff at the Verizon Wireless Arena in Manchester was at 7:30, and I needed a hot meal and a few early Friday evening beers after more than eight hours in the Jeep. I resolved to scout out a skating pond in Maine Saturday afternoon.

Three puckhead chums journeyed up to New England to join me this weekend, but they beat me here by a full day. Marleen rang my cell Friday while I was on the New Jersey Turnpike to alert me to some shinny she thought she observed while driving through Massachusetts. Turned out to be a guy ice fishing. "If you're mistaking an ice fisherman for a pond hockey player," I told her, "must have been Joe Reekie out there." Hah.

Major League Baseball is already in its second week of exhibition games, but I'm hardly ready for spring, and so this long weekend journey north is spa-therapeutic for my hockey soul. One can almost chart winter's staying power and depth with each 100 miles migrated north. In New York state, I regularly see massive crests of ice that have bled through rugged rockwall framing the highway.

This is my fifth or sixth weekend tour of the American Hockey League, and this one will include a Sunday Q' League matinée in Lewiston, Maine. Fifteen minutes into my visit to Manchester, New Hampshire's, Verizon Wireless Arena Friday night, I'm overcome by a conviction that this league has just about everything right while its big, far more expensive brother would do well to emulate approximately 75 of the A League's features.

The most obvious: one can plop down $20 at the box office and two minutes later press one's face against the glass. We can quibble about what are admission rates that are good for both owners and hockey families in the NHL, but 20 bucks sure seems right for a prime perch for minor pro hockey. And make no mistake -- the 'A' is damn good pro hockey.