Octopus Thrower’s Pond Hockey 2015
“Come on, guys, let’s start playing hockey. We’re not out of this unless we’re down by more than eight.”
Matt uttered this line as his team fell down 3-0 near the start of the game of Posts. But let me back up first before we get into the recap.
Pond hockey has been a tradition for my family and the neighbors for as long as they’ve lived next door, which is going on eighteen years. The format has changed over the years as we’ve all grown up, moved out, gone off to college, and come back from college. We once thought maybe this year would be rink-less because the youngest neighbor, Kelsey, is off at college. But with the oldest, Dave, returning, we were spared that misfortune.
The “classic” teams–the teams we have formed since the rink came to be–are Dave, Ben, and me versus Matt, Mike, and Kelsey. With Mike unavailable for the evening, I had to call the farm team to get a replacement. Teams were Dave, Ben, and me versus Matt, Kelsey, and our own Peter Fish! (Who has actually been over on several occasions to play hockey, but let’s go with the farm team analogy.)
At 7:15pm, the temperature was a balmy 7F with a wind chill advisory that made it feel like it’s -1F. Our cheeks burned as soon as we walked outside. Fingers stiffen in gloves, toes react to the temperature change. It’s a feeling we all know well, and while it may be uncomfortable at first, it’s a feeling we love.
After chatting for a while and shooting pucks around as our normal “warmups,” Kelsey and I took the faceoff with Dave dropping the puck. I won and immediately passed it to Dave and everyone on the other team started yelling about cheating and having the ref on our side.
If you have never played Posts, it’s a tough game. Playing without goalies makes scoring goals way too easy, and you’re going to have a game that ends up being 24-22. Aiming for the posts takes a lot of patience, frustration, and sheer luck, and makes games much closer. Our rules for Posts: The puck has to hit the post off the ice; every post on the net counts; if the puck hits net first, then the post, it doesn’t count; and if a shot hits one post and immediately hits another, it counts as two.
Team Dave, Ben, and Me went up 3-0 fairly quickly, which was when Matt uttered the comment at the top of this post (albeit jokingly). Within minutes, it was 3-2, when we took a water break–and repaired a sizable hole near the boards (pictured on the right). A bucket of pucks was placed on top of the repair job. “We’ve played with cones on the ice before,” I said.
“Yeah, they make for good bank shots,” Matt agreed.
The game continued, punctured by a quick visit from Dave, Ben, and Kelsey’s dad, who took pictures and commented to Peter and Ben, fighting along the boards, that “it’s just pond hockey,” because they were playing a little too intensely.
“Does anyone else have the score or is it just me?” Matt asked during a break in play. “It’s 6-5 us.”
The game continued with the cold wind picking up and battering against our layers of clothing. It hits 8:30pm and the score was 9-6 Matt/Peter/Kelsey, thanks to Kelsey getting a streak of posts. We decided to call the end of the game at 8:45pm and Dave exclaimed that we only needed three goals to tie it up.
That was when the Gustav Nyquist-esque plays started happening. You know, when one guy has the puck and decides to try to skate around everyone for far too long without passing it to a teammate. But that’s the norm when our games get to that point.
Of course, once we declare the time remaining, the pace picked up. Dave hit one post to bring our team within two, but Kelsey put them back up by three. The last ten minutes also resulted in a lot of “missing pucks,” aka someone shot it far out into the yard, so to save time, we grabbed pucks sitting in the nets already.
It came to a next-goal-wins scenario, though ours had to be a triple-shot to at least tie it. In the end, Peter hit the sidebar to win it, and Matt/Kelsey/Peter won, 11-7.
Front, L to R: Kelsey, Christina
Back, L to R: Peter, Matt, Ben, and Dave
“Why would you go out and play pond hockey in this weather?” a coworker asked me this morning, sounding as if I had gone crazy.
Because in the -1F weather, no one else ventures from their houses. The entire outdoors is ours to take in and use as we please. It doesn’t matter that by the end, we can barely feel our fingers and toes. Or that we can’t open our water bottles because they have frozen shut.
We can be as loud as we want, as competitive as we want, because in the end, it’s nothing but sheer fun. And that’s the best thing to do in the chilly weather.