The good old hockey game

It was gone for too long … not for me because I only really care as a byproduct of my son caring … but gone for too long for my hockey-mad boy. The hockey strike is over now tho’ and the shortened season is better than no season at all, you can be sure of that.

Even after a lifetime of watching hockey, even after years and years of being the daughter and sister of hockey-mad men, the mother of a hockey-mad boy, I’m shaky on all the finer points of the game. Mostly I just like watching people fly down the ice, propelled by glutes and quads and hellbent focus. I can enjoy nearly any sport, provided I can admire the body’s role in it. Car-racing is stupid to me because it just seems like sitting there. Sitting there going fast, granted, but still just sitting there.

And maybe I’m just a geezer—okay, who’m I kidding, I totally am a geezer—but I definitely give preference to the hockeying of yesteryear. Not just the pro hockeying, altho’ little can compare with watching Guy Lafleur tear down the ice with his unfettered locks streaming behind him, but the nonpro stuff especially. It’s all so organised now, with little kids competing in highly structured games, leagues, tourneys … too much pressure, I sometimes think, all that, too much pointless pressure. Maybe it would be better just to let the hockey happen more, the way it did when my brothers and I were kids. To get up and head off to the rink for a jillion hours of unorganised and superfun shinny … I’m a fan of that, but of course I would be, given that I’m really not so keen on heavily schedulised regimentation for little kids. It’s cool to have a thing you like to do and to just go do it, without parental involvement, without somebody telling you when or how to do it. The fly-and-be-free approach. I like it. I like it as much as I liked The Flower’s glorious flowstream of hair.

Still and all, I do take pleasure in watching the Habs go toe-to-toe with all those other high-paid hockey men and am happy, even for my own sake, to have them all back to bring an opportunity to cheer and yell, to yell and curse,  here in the cold old winter.

(And if you don’t watch any of the other video I’ve posted, watch this first one. The Sweater, written and narrated by the most glorious Roch Carrier.)