The night after Eliot Spitzer entered the race for New York City Comptroller, I found myself playing in a late-night men’s-league ice-hockey game against Anthony Weiner, the disgraced former congressman who was—and, amazingly, seems still to be—running for Mayor in spite of rounds of revelations about his propensity for sending lewd selfies to strangers.

Ours is a muckers’ league, with a fairly wide range of age and skill. (I’m at the high end of one and the low end of the other.) But this wasn’t just any game. It was the semifinals. In other words, it mattered more to the participants, perhaps even to Weiner, than anything else going on in our lives or in the news. Weiner plays goalie. His team is called the Falcons. Our team is the Intangibles—the intangibles being what we like to think we have, to the exclusion of most other attributes. Most of my teammates and I had played against Weiner before, many times. (A few years ago, when Weiner was a mayoral prospect and had yet to be caught tweeting dirty, a Times reporter attended one of our games and then described the action in the paper, noting that a fight broke out. It wasn’t a fight. It was a guy on the Falcons punching me in the face, for reasons I don’t recall. You can’t always believe what you read.)

In our previous game against the Falcons, one of our forwards, a former college player known to us as Fitzy, had scored six goals on Weiner, each time on a breakaway, employing the same maneuver: fake left, cut right, tuck the puck backhand between Weiner’s legs. A five-hole, as it’s called. At one point, Fitzy estimated that in his beer-league career he’d scored on Weiner with this deke two hundred and ninety-two times. (The Elias Sports Bureau has no record of this.) Near the end of the game, Fitzy skated in on Weiner on yet another breakaway. Weiner wasn’t going to fall for it this time, was he? Oh boy. Once again, Weiner was, as they say, completely undressed. Those of us watching from the bench hung our heads in embarrassment, and maybe to hide our snickering, which could be grounds for more punches to the face. If he had so much trouble with the backhand five-hole, he’d be no match for the teachers’ union or the party hacks in the Bronx.

We won that game, and the semifinals as well. (Our subsequent loss in the finals, two games to one, is another story, too painful to tell.) After the semifinals, in the handshake line, Weiner, who’d given up seventeen goals to our team in two games, was uncommonly friendly and solicitous, as though he was canvassing for the beer-league vote. I skated off the ice alongside him, and had enough time to ask him what he thought of Spitzer’s decision to run for comptroller. “It seems impulsive,” Weiner said, dismissively. He had his goalie mask tipped back on his head. His looked immense in his pads. His penchant for making the same mistakes, over and over—his issues between the legs and between the ears—had ended his hockey season but had yet to finish off his mayoral campaign. The clock is winding down. It might be time to pull the goalie.

Photograph by Leigh Vogel/NHLI/Getty.