I have just returned home from a youth hockey tournament in southeastern Pennsylvania, likely the last youth hockey tournament in my immediate future. It was a tough year for our Bantams; entering this weekend they had tied a pair, won once, and lost close to 40 games while always skating with their heads up, their game faces on and their work ethic strong. We always conclude the year with a tournament, mostly for the players to have a chance to hang out as a team, for the parents to do some bonding in a space that’s not chilled to 40 degrees, and to get the players to see competition from other parts of the country.
Tournament hockey plays with your mind like a rod hockey neophyte, twirling, twirling, twisting, then making contact and forcing your attention elsewhere. Halfway through this tournament, we knew that we had been mathematically eliminated from the medal game, and we were playing for pride and a fitting conclusion to the season. This morning started the same as every other Sunday from September to April over the past nine years: get up, explore some breakfast options, and pack it off to the rink. There is something comforting and rewarding to that regularity. There is something terrifying about thinking that this is the last time you’ll conclude the natural cycle of the hockey season.
Our roster for the last game of our tournament was creative: one of our goalies dressed as a skater, squeezing into a borrowed pair of pants so that he wouldn’t miss his last ice slot of the year. We lost one forward to a hip injury on Saturday, but one of our regular defenseman came back from bad muscle pull to skate this morning. We mixed the lines up and put defensemen up front, regular forwards on the blue line, a chance for everyone to branch out. The only reward — to be won or lost — was a sense of playing the game well.
We held a 1-0 lead after one (our first lead in the entire tournament); were tied 1-1 after two and then got into the essence of youth hockey: two teams working hard to put an exclamation point on the season, to score one more goal, to avoid a long trip home after losing the last game of the year. There’s nothing “meaningless” about a game that may end up begin a reflection of a 14-year old’s thoughts on the year. Long after the opponents are forgotten, the scores are ignored, and the won-loss records fade into that teenage boy memory space between hygiene and taking out the trash, young players remember having fun. They remember catching the eye of a store manager in the mall (not in a good way); they remember team lunches and dinners; they remember those “bright shining moments” captured in the CBS NCAA tournament song of nearly the same name. Not medals, championships, or trophies; small shared experiences to be enjoyed, personally, for as long as they keep us warm in the winter.
Six springs ago, Bubba’s first Mite travel hockey season ended with a tournament on this very weekend. It was magic then as it is now. In a game that would decide the medal teams, tied 1-1 deep in the third, Bubba found himself streaking (as much as he streaks) up ice with Casey, a defenseman who had joined the play from the weak side. A classic odd-man rush, and the type of thing that elicits noise from the faithful parents way out of proportion to the actual number of times it results in a goal, especially in Mites. That year, that season, that rush, Bubba passed the puck to Casey, who buried it for what would stand up as the game winner. Bubba’s team finished second; nobody remembers the score of the final game or even the opponent, but Bubba remembers that play as a shining moment, the first of many in many years of travel hockey. As for Casey, he still plays at a high level, and his mom distilled an entire montage of youth hockey into her book Casey and Derek On The Ice.
This morning the roles were effectively reversed. Bubba was playing D, and two of our wings started an odd man rush. Cutting into the slot, Bubba got a picture-perfect pass and put the puck in the net. That, too, stood up as the winning goal, only our second win of the year, and the only win that I saw in person. If in fact Bubba passes on travel hockey to pick up football next season, I’ll be left with a pair of similarly-shaped bookends to his travel hockey experience: a goal and an assist; great teammates; coaches who cared more about the players than their team’s record; smiles to last the entire ride home.
For me, the biggest change is that this was probably my last game as a team manager; the last time I put my name and theirs on a blank scoresheet, to have them fill it with the statistics of hard work and dedication. I feel a profound sadness that this small part of my father-son relationship has ended. But my friend Bruce found the perfect antidote to that ending — bring Bubba to our Friday night adult pick-up games as a player. And the cycle of small shining moments begins again.
