Tuesday, March 10, 2009

My First Hockey Memory


I remember my first game of pond hockey.

Now, I should clarify myself. This probably wasn’t the first time I had actually skated on a pond and definitely wasn’t the first time I played hockey, but none of that matters. This was the moment I became a hockey player.

I was probably six or seven years old at the time and absolutely loving the game. I had “played” since I was probably a few years old (knocking sticks and pucks on the ice with my dad qualifies to me as playing) and by this age I had learned how to skate, albeit hesitantly, but was slow on my curve. I hadn’t even learned to raise the puck.

This particular weekend I was away visiting my grandparents who lived about 45 minutes from me. Before I left to come home at the end of weekend my father suggested we go out to a pond a few blocks away and play a little hockey (he had brought both mine and his skates and sticks with him to pick me up). It was a beautiful, late winter day and I was only too excited to get outside.

We spent the first half-hour or so shoveling the ice – well, he shoveled, I helped – and then dropped a puck and began to play. It was just the two of us, but at stake was the Stanley Cup and neither was willing to lose the chance to hoist it in the bitter cold.

I don’t remember what we talked about, if anything. In fact, very few details of that day remain besides the big picture of it all. I do, however, remember taking a shot and having it go wide of our net that we had set up with two shoes on the ice and drifting over the snow bank we had built. I climbed over the snow that couldn’t have been more than six or eight inches off the ground and flicked the puck to get it back into play…I had raised it over the bank.

I looked up at my father with eyes that only a child doing something so brilliant and magical for the first time could give and said, “I did it, I raised the puck!” I don’t remember what my father’s response was, or anything that happened later in the game, but I know that was the moment I truly became a hockey player.

Today, you can play at any number of thousands of local ponds all over the world, skate all winter on the Rideau Canal in Ottawa, or even register for the World Pond Hockey Championships in Plaster Rock, New Brunswick. The game though and what it means to countless kids, teens and adults around the world, remains the same.

You can have your fancy multiplex arenas and heated benches all you want, I’ll be out back raising the puck over the bank.

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