The answer to this question is sure to bring confusion and stupid looks from anyone who does not or has never played the game or understood it. The answer will bring deranged smiles and excited laughs from those who have felt a bone-crushing body check or those who have heard a puck bang off an iron post or even raised their hands in pure joy of sliding a round disk past a menacing monster with a big stick.

To simply tell the reader the answer in my mind by trying to describe the game would be only more confusing and, in most cases, would keep the reader from finishing this article. I can�t describe the game, but I can describe the feelings that it gives me. So here goes nothing...

Night Before Christmas
Hours before playing hockey I find myself thinking of game situations. I get nervous, but not a scared kind of nervous, more an excited kind of nervous. It feels like I�m a kid waiting for Christmas morning. I decide what color jersey I will wear and think of a hockey team hat to go with it. I check and double check my equipment remembering not to forget anything. I carefully choose my sticks. I pick them out and test their weight in my hand. I check the blades and wonder to myself how many goals I might score � almost like I�m preparing for battle.

At the rink, while putting on my battle gear, we sit and talk about the pros. We give our opinions on professional hockey games, coaching tactics and pro players. Then the conversation changes to equipment. We talk about what equipment is new and show each other marks of previous battles on our tattered and torn gear. Our gear gives off a lurid odor, but nobody cares.

Skating is poetic. It is a feeling of flying without leaving the ground. A team passes the puck around being physically punished at every turn to try and score. What other game has such celebrations after scoring as hockey does? That probably has to do with the cost of scoring. It always comes at a high price.

Ready to Play

These feelings get me ready to play even as I type this article. I play a game tomorrow morning and I don�t see how I will ever wait that long.

We skate until our legs burn and our backs ache. We come home and pay for our adventure sometimes long into the next day. This is when that thought bounces back into my wife�s mind especially when I beg her to rub my aching back and legs.

But she didn�t skate, didn�t pass, didn�t shoot and didn�t deliver that perfectly timed hit to up-end the opponent. She may never understand any of this. Many people don�t. But a hockey player that reads this will smile and then probably rush out to find a game. If that fails, he will turn to his equipment and examine the battle scars and remember the place and the feelings he had during that game.

No more typing for me! It�s time to tape my blade for tomorrow�s battle!

This first appeared in the 11/97 issue of Hockey Player Magazine®
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