An improbable thing happened at summer hockey last night.

I knew I wasn't going to be bringing my best game as I pulled a muscle and have been struggling with sciatica since Friday. It hurt bad enough I thought about skipping the game altogether. But there was a question of how many people would show up and I didn't want to leave my team short. I jumped on the stationary bike and warmed up for ten minutes before the game. It didn't really help.

Our team is a thrown together hodgepodge of skaters. Half a dozen of them in their early twenties or younger (most of whom have played hockey longer than I). I was in pain and I'm not a big goal scorer, so when everyone was fighting to play forward, I had no qualms about volunteering to play defense. It's closer to my natural home as a goalie anyway. There aren't a lot of guys who will stand in front of a shot in a recreational league game. I can't help myself; it's just in my nature to stand in front of fast moving objects. I don't know why.

The first shift of the game was rough. I was playing with a new partner and we really didn't read each other well. Not to put any blame on my counterpart, but our efforts were just short of making us the best players on the other team. Our opponents spent the majority of my first shift using our goalie as a ballistic impact testing device. Fortunately he was up to the task and kept the barrage of rubber out of the net.

My second shift, I ended up with another defensive partner. My first one headed off to grab a different stick. This was likely an excuse to escape my early game mediocrity and play hockey with someone else. While some might find this insulting, I must applaud that type of quick thinking. Regardless, the second shift was slightly better, though there was one bad breakout when both of us were playing the same side of the ice.

My new defensive counterpart and I discussed this on the bench: 

“I thought you were on left D?”

“Huh, I thought you were.”

“You want left?”

“I don't care.”

With that not so clearly decided, we both took left D when we got back on the ice. This worked surprisingly well though. We swapped a few times until I ended up on the right side toward the end of the shift. Surprisingly, the game was actually being played in the attack zone once in a while. We were finally starting to gel and even had a few shots on net, but still not quite taking it to them. I'd guess the shot count at this point was about 64 to 3 (us having the three).

The pace was blistering. I haven't played a league game in a few years. It's amazing how much harder people work when there are refs, scorekeepers and post-game beer. Compared to the lunchtime pickup game I play three times a week the only way to describe it is frenetic. It's likely that I was the slowest guy out there, even certain with my pain-diminished skills. Perhaps, other than the opposing goalie, I was the oldest guy on the ice, but that goalie, he's some kind of fitness freak who apparently still can pass cars while riding his bike up steep mountain roads. Why would anyone ride a bike up a mountain if they're old enough to drive?

Thus, when one of my teammates passed the puck to me, the old guy at the point, I was slightly surprised. With the puck on my stick, I made a move to elude the left wing. He was clearly surprised as well as he ended up seven feet behind me going the wrong way. Perhaps the entire opposing team was confused. There was a huge void between me and the net as they ardently protected the boards. I was thinking pass, but as I curled toward the net, I had a shooting lane and a sliver of goal. I pulled the trigger and watched. I wasn't sure I could trust my eyes as the puck tickled the wide side of the net, an inch inside the pipe, four inches above the goalie's leg pad.

The ref pointed to the net. I was awarded with fist bumps and the type of nods generally reserved for a fine painting in a museum. I thanked the teammate who passed it to me and skated back toward the bench. As I passed the scorekeeper's box, the guy inside gave me an inquisitive look. I'm not sure what he was thinking, but I figured it was, “Seriously? With all that talent out there you were the first to score?”

I smiled and nodded at him (mostly to make sure he credited my goal to the right person). Maybe I smiled too broadly. Maybe I nodded too ardently. But my back was killing me. I just scored the first goal of the season. I knew I could it would be okay for me to leave the ice early. 

I left because I felt like I was hurting the team and I knew I was hurting myself. I'll let you draw your own conclusion about whether there is a correlation here--my team was winning 2-0 when I left. They were down 3-2 when I limped out of the locker room during the second period. As I watched from the benches, they struggled back to a 5-5 tie at the end when an opposing player was kind enough to tip the puck into his own net. (That always makes you a favorite with the goalie). I'm not going to say that the guy twice as old as most of his teammates, with the jacked up back was the difference in the first period . . . but as I hobbled out of the rink one of my opponents yelled, “You sand-bagger! You get a couple points and leave?” I'll take that as a compliment on a team with so much skill even if I did only have one point.