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After spending the early spring romanticizing my imminent return to the ice and then the later part of the spring feeling a little bit concerned about it (not that my concern was enough to get me on my skates more than once), I finally donned my new team’s jersey and clomped up those familiar old stairs to the rink.  The first women’s team I’ve played on in years, heck, the second one I’ve played on in my life, was delightfully welcoming.  A lovely bunch of ladies.  A lovely very polite bunch of ladies.  After playing mostly with men, it startled me to hear a quick, “I’m sorry,” more than once after a good collision.  More on that later.  In any case, I showed up just in the knick of time, launched myself onto the ice in the mood to go a hundred miles a minute, and then realized that we barely had a whole two lines.

That whole short, hard shifts philosophy goes right on out the window when you have to spend fully half the game trying to be useful.  By my second shift (which seemed to come up far, far too soon) I was huffing and puffing and sliding a little sideways on my still unsharpened skates.   Huh.  I thought I might barf.  I thought I might faint.  I didn’t really care which came first.  ‘Hmm,’ I thought to myself.  ‘Self, you can run, you can hurl, and you can bike, but you are sorrowfully, sorrowfully out of shape for ice hockey.’  I spent the rest of the game heaving like an asthmatic rhino and wondering why I’d used to think this was so much fun.

The second game I had my customary good attitude but very, very low hopes for myself.   I played defense, which was unusual for me (at least, in hockey) and suddenly started to feel a whole lot better about my world.  If you can read the play well enough to put yourself in approximately the right place at nearly the right time, you don’t always have to be skating quite as maniacally as the forwards do, it seems.  The lightbulb went on above my helmet.  I may be a little older and a little slower than I once was, but I may also be a little bit smarter.  Maybe.  I can tell you I felt a whole lot more useful in that second game than I had the first and a whole lot less sore the next day.  It took me the better part of a week to recover from that first game, I’m sorry to report, but the second game had me feeling spry a mere day or so after.  Better.  So.  Much.  Better.

Which brings us up to week three.  Suddenly, it clicked again.  The fun was back.  For the first time this season, I felt playful zipping around.  I cheerfully stick checked those I could catch and good naturedly jostled the women skating down on me.  I happily offered advice to those newer in the game than I and yodelled enthusiastic encouragement to the ones who could skate circles around me.  By week 3, hockey is fun again.  Thank god.  Just what was I so worried about again? ~DG