It’s been a tough 11 months for hockey players of all kinds in this country, especially the recreational type.
Which would include me and my now-mediocre goaltending skills. Actually, I’ve been a mediocre goalie for the better part of a decade. But I like to play and it helps keep me in some sort of shape.
It’s been Hockey Night in Elmvale on Saturdays for as long as I can remember, but it ended mid-March 2020. That’s when the pandemic was declared and the first lockdown began, closing hockey rinks throughout Simcoe County.
Now don’t get me wrong. It was the right decision and hockey players of all types have not had it anywhere as bad as seniors, personal service workers, health-care employees, paramedics, nurses, doctors and the many others on the front-line against COVID-19.
We’re just missing hockey — playing it, talking about the game afterwards and icing down various parts of our bodies which have been slammed by inadvertent bodies, sticks or frozen pucks.
And the hockey I play is almost purely recreational, with oldsters like me facing teenagers and young bucks in their 20s, along with women.
But you know what they say — you never know what you’ve got until it’s gone.
And I’ve played no hockey in about 11 months, surely the longest period I’ve been off the ice (except for a few nasty injuries which have shelved me).
It helped, of course, when the National Hockey’s League’s millionaire players and its billionaire owners got the revenues straight on some summer hockey in Toronto and Edmonton (as it was too dangerous to play in the United States, with now-previous American president Donald Trump treating the pandemic like a weak flu).
Too bad my Toronto Maples Leafs folded like a cheap umbrella in a windstorm, losing their playdown series as the Tampa Bays cruised to a Stanley Cup championship.
But you know what? I just don’t find watching NHL hockey as interesting when I’m not going to the rink once a week, suiting up in all that body armour I wear and spending most of the evening fishing the puck out of my own net. That kinship is becoming lost, for whatever reasons.
Not that I ever had any delusions about playing pro hockey. I would have been lucky to play Junior ‘C’ hockey when I was in my prime, at about 18 or 19 years of age.
I remember having a short conversation with my father about my hockey prospects during the last year of high school. We both decided I would stay at home, stay in school, then get a post-secondary education to have a fighting chance of ever being employed.
Our plan worked, sort of, but I never really stopped playing hockey, talking hockey, watching hockey.
It’s a Canadian thing, I guess, but probably also something that many Canadians don’t understand anymore.
During this pandemic there’s been much talk about isolation, about our regular routines being upended, about the activities which help take away stress being shuttered.
That goes for recreational hockey players, too. They’ve lost that time on the ice when all they have to think about is skating, stickhandling around an opponent, making a crisp pass or firing that bar-down snapper (a Letterkenny-ism, I believe) past the goalie.
As for me, there’s nothing like being between the pipes, facing down a shooter and getting enough leather on the shot so they don’t score. Whatever my stresses are in life, I’m not thinking about them when tending goal. That’s the kind of inattention that leads to taking a puck right between the eyes.
It’s a much-needed break from all the unwanted stresses of everyday life.
So I miss hockey, and can’t see playing it again until at least next fall, when most Canadians should be vaccinated.
But it is a small price to pay if it helps rid us of this plague.
Bob Bruton is a BarrieToday staff reporter who covers local politics and city council.
