On Frozen Blog

Rink ice is rarely rented during the holiday week. The principal payoff for a year’s worth of surrendered Sundays making ice there is this week: the evening sheets are mine for endless recreating. If Christmas makes children of us all, Christmas week makes me l’enfant de shinny.

My beer league teammates always answer the call. Richard and Andrew, hideously youthful, supremely skilled, and great friends, I ring first. Brian from Buffalo — a slick stickhandler — I dial next. Ted and Tree I sound out, too — even a small game of shinny needs muckers! Our beer league team, with conspicuously little roster upheaval, has been together more than 15 years.

Together we six form a hardcore set of shinny skaters: willing to pack the gear bags and leave behind out-of-town family and friends, on multiple nights, for rink  travel near and not so near, to skate in age- and rules-ignoring splendor. To sweat, smile, and rib one another for hours. To be together playing the game we love. To be boys again.   

Necessarily, we have no goalie; for impromptu games of mere recreation they are harder to come by than shopping mall parking spaces this week. We’ll play for pipes.

Our dressing room is half its normal game volume of bodies, but it feels full because of the sacrifices made to be here and the spirit of our endeavor: we few, we happy few, we band of unsanctioned shinny brothers.

I am middle-aged, and while keeping up with the room’s rancor I dress with the apprehension of an out-of-shape, quasi retired, let’s-see-if-can-trick-my-body-into-one-more-night-of-magic wish-maker. The odds, I know, are long. The desire, however, during this week, never wavers.  

Near 8:00 and otherwise armored, I announce myself ice-bound, helmetless, “in honor of Rocket.” I never play shinny in a helmet, especially in small games among friends. It’s my individual act of civil disobediance, and I don’t give a damn what anybody thinks of it. Sometimes, after shinny, I’ll ride home late in my Jeep sans seatbelt, blaring loud rock music, too. Somehow I seem to survive this razor’s edge of living.

We position the two cages perpendicular to their normal perches in the creases, and skate across the Olympic-sized sheet’s offensive zones. That’s space enough, and after we chew it up a bit we’ll move down to the pristine end and chew that up too.

We skate furiously for ninety seconds or so, then settle in to more upright, carefully timed bursts of forechecking and attack. The beer-leaguer’s aerobics. Often, puck carriers are afforded conspicuously easy entrace to the scoring zones. But then they confront a minefield of cage-defending checkers. The pace deadens at times, but we fail to break for water and breath for fully twenty-plus minutes. That’s something.

It’s a small game, the scoreboard is dark, the stands are entirely empty, but the competition among us is as fierce as if we were contesting the finals for our league’s Stanley Bucket. When a player alleges a tally from the feintest of nicked posts or crossbar, he’s instantly shouted down, sometimes even by his teammates. Goals in our games are awarded only to the irrefutable cracks and clanks of heavy, well-targeted wristers. 

When we do break I collapse in a corner, crumpled to the ice, my chest pounding, exertion vapor forming a halo about my head. For a few seconds I am melancholy from middle age mediocrity, reflecting on AWOL speed and reaction time, on newly arrived joint stiffness I knew about previously only from my father’s post-skating complaints. But I am in my gear, soaked with sweat, skating (at times hard) with my ‘mates deep into an evening before holiday mornings without an office to report to. This form of fatigue will ensure a motionless sleep under blankets tonight, and in the morning I’ll happily shuffle in ache through the well-earned stiffness to the kitchen coffee maker.    

We made a rule: no goal counts unless it was assisted — at least one pass from a teammate. Once I made a fancy rush up through all three foes, dangling and pivoting, elliciting cries of praise from my linemates, and thundered a rocket smack in the middle of the crossbar. As the puck angle-launched high up over the netting behind the cage I hot-dogged swawn-dived onto my belly and skidded out to center ice, to exclamation point my feat.

“No pass!” the three defenders gaveled in unison.

“But I own your jocks and socks,” I protested.

“No pass,” my linemates, a bit quieter, confirmed.   

Here is how I know I am an old hockey player: when caromed pucks elude and race down the Olympic-sized sheet I look for others to retrieve. Once, not all that long ago, I did the retrieving, and took pride in it. Retrieving that small black disc down at the other end now seems an Olympian task, as if I’m skating on a Great Lake. Now I watch Richard and Andrew make like jack rabbits and galloping stallions after the puck.

Bastards.  

Here is how I know I am a lucky hockey player: our next skate is Thursday.