Go ahead, fill out those brackets for March Madness and allow your emotions sway as you bring Kentucky or Indiana or Louisville (the women, most likely) deep into the tournament. I, on the other hand, will be checking the B League pairings for the Louisville Adult Hockey Players Association, where my team, the Blues, will be defending the coveted Stanley Keg. This traveling trophy is the beer league equivalent of pro hockey’s Stanley Cup, and like its archetype, it’s etched deeply into puck lore, though admittedly on a bit less lofty level. Just as the Cup is engraved with the names of every member of every National Hockey League club that has captured it in the annual playoffs, the Keg that holds our cup is stamped with the names of each champion club’s players and passed along from winner to winner. There for all to conjure up: the ghosts of Keg games past.
Hah! But for the few girlfriends, wives and children too young to demand that they stay home, no one watches Keg action except the participants or members of other teams in the league. I’m well beyond my productive years on the ice — even the legendary Gordie Howe, who lasted long enough to play professionally with his sons, was out of his skates for good at age 52 — yet a year beyond that I’m still lacing them up on with the boys on Sunday nights.
Why this superannuated silliness? There’s the simple explanation: I don’t want to retire my youth. And there’s the complex one: Ditto.
Hockey attracts a rare breed with its speed, collisions and the potential of injurious contact with several unyielding surfaces — a vulcanized rubber puck, metal goalposts and crossbars, boards and glass, even the ice itself. Our league outlaws checking, that deliberate attempt to crush the man with the puck, but forms of rubbing off are allowed and bigger hits sometimes result, not to mention unexpected high-speed encounters with immovable obstacles. In the context of this institutionalized mayhem, the difficult-to-master skills of passing, shooting and puck-handling — as well as the savvy to impose some patterns in attacks on goal — represent an attempt to bring order to the chaos. You have to enjoy the edginess of hockey to successfully employ its finer points.
Guys who thrive on this borderline between finesse and violence will say and do some surprising things. That makes the locker room storytelling and banter particularly entertaining. Imagine the cutting up, so to speak, when a teammate recently told us about the time he took a stick blade to the face and, rather than driving to the emergency room for the several stitches required, went home and squeezed Super Glue from a tube directly into his gash and successfully sealed the wound — while his wife, a nurse, slept in another room none the wiser.
Yes, we have college degrees (even Mr. Super Glue). The group I currently play with ranges in age from late 20s to, well, me and includes a handful of Michiganders, three Minnesotans, a couple of Canadians and one player each from Pittsburgh and Chicago. Most of us competed in high school hockey and a few were on college rosters. The league, in fact, is better — more competitive and loaded with advanced players — than ever. I should know; but for a few pseudo-retirement seasons on the sidelines, I’ve been skating in adult leagues here since the mid-1980s.
We keep hurling ourselves into the sport of our youth because we don’t want to relinquish its intensity. I rarely score now; I struggle to get up the speed to go around an opponent and must focus more of my experience on avoiding mistakes that hurt the team than on creating opportunities that help it. Hey, I know my role.
But occasionally that old freewheeling feeling starts to flow again on the ice. My skates glide effortlessly as an opening presents itself, the paths of teammates are mapped clearly in my brain and the puck feels well under my control. With defenders closing in and the goaltender moving to cut off the best angle to the goal, it’s now or never — a time for action. One perfectly threaded pass can produce an easy score for a linemate. A well-targeted shot to a tiny opening left by the goalie can bring me a tally. All else is missed opportunity — until, perhaps, the next time down the ice.
It’s hard to give up moments like this, even as they begin to slip away with the years.