I wasn’t going to the NHL.

I should’ve realized that when I was 11 and still playing for the New York Stars in Brooklyn, but if I’m really honest with myself, I didn’t believe it until I was 19. After the first tryout for the club team at SUNY Oswego, I thought I had strained an abdominal muscle. I spent all night ralphing in the Funnelle 8th floor bathroom, and the next day I took the bus to the hospital to have my appendix removed.

I still remember the bitter disappointment I felt when I spoke to the coach and he told me he picked the team while I was recovering from surgery, and there was nothing he could do. Those words were poison. It was the first year I wasn’t playing hockey, and I had no idea what the hell I was going to do.

***

No matter how unrealistic your dreams are, like a hopeless first love, they are nearly impossible to let go, and it’s only way after the fact that you have the perspective to take a good look back and see how it changed you. Among my loves, hockey is unique in that I had it from the beginning. I made it around a rink a few days before turning 3. It didn’t just change me — it made me. It’s my first love, and boy, I fell hard.

My god, there is just nothing like it. It seems like it’s from another planet, doesn’t it? The point of it is to (while on ice) push a piece of rubber past 5 guys trying to kill you and a goalie dressed in the most bizarre^^ equipment in the world and into a net, all on what is pretty much two strips of metal on boots. And all those angry guys have sticks that they find ways to legally harm you with. No wonder all those hockey players are crazy. I’m just as crazy as any of them because I can’t think of anything more fun to do.

It’s hard to reconcile the fact that the first time on ice, my dad said I didn’t want to play. According to him, he had to join a men’s league to inspire me to join Abe Stark’s house league. Those of you who have seen George on skates know that there is nothing less inspiring in the whole wide world.

But join the hockey world I did. The hockey world is an emotional, ritualistic place that takes a lot of dedication to be a part of. Because of its relative unpopularity, there aren’t rinks in every town, so travel, early mornings, and late nights are part of its landscape. I didn’t have a free winter weekend for probably 10 years. God bless my parents for taking me and my 3 brothers all over the tri-state area and dealing with the post-game smell.

I’m the kind of person who considers sleeping until 1 PM a great day. But wake me up at 6:00 AM with promise of driving me 45 minutes to a rink in Freeport, LI surrounded by a dirty bubble and I’ll even make you breakfast. Actually, I won’t, but I will buy you a bacon, egg, and cheese. (Random hockey memory — James Gilhooly’s dad made him pay for Burger King one morning after a game when we were 12 years old. And another – our team slept over James’s house and we couldn’t all fit in the kitchen to eat dinner, so we ate in shifts. Bobby, the biggest kid on our team, double-shifted).

I can tell you exactly which exits are between my house and my home rink, Abe Stark, and to this day I still get a thrill of anticipation driving on the Belt and seeing the signs for Exit 6S – Cropsey Avenue South, right after coming over the train yard and seeing the old parachute jump off to left visible beyond the ugly apartment buildings right on the beach, its blinking red light guiding me to the shore like a lighthouse.

Driving to games is an adventure in itself. I remember one time my dad was driving me and Sean Kirby to a playoff game in Westchester. I know Westchester is rural by NYC standards, but we woke up in the middle of a corn field. My dad just laughed and said, “I fucked up.” We made it to the game in time to get smoked.

Another time, on a tournament, I watched from our minivan as Bill Murphy buried his car into a snowbank in New Hampshire, and 4 cars of hockey players and parents laughed hysterically as we tried to push him out.

Even getting dressed in the locker room is thrilling: the slow, measured build of tension in the room as you see the equipment pile on your teammates like they’re gladiators dressing for battle, the weirdly sacred ways kids dressed themselves, never deviating from their routines. I still remember being confused when Timmy Faroul would put on his skates before his shinguards, and my own way – left everything first – left shinguard, left sock, left leg through the pants, left skate, left should strap, left elbow pad, left glove. Putting the helmet and cage on was like slipping into a different world. I’d give myself a smack on the helmet after I snapped the straps on to get my head right. Looking through the cage somehow sharpened my vision. On the ice I sometimes felt like a cat stalking a vulcanized, rubber mouse.

Hearing the zamboni doors close brings the tension to a stressful level. Waiting for the ice to dry is agonizing. Finally, you burst onto the rink, ripping the first lap around your net like a comet.

***

Whenever I think of hockey, I think of poetry. I know that sounds weird at first. But the two have so much in common. Both are so beautifully honest and open. You can be “invisible” on the ice (can’t remember which coach coined that term for me, but I remember certain wingers who fit that description), but you can’t hide. You can call almost anything a poem, but that doesn’t make it so. In both scenarios, you can end up looking like a buffoon.

They both require patience, repetition, grace. Hockey and poetry have that elusive ability to help me capture that flighty bastard, The Moment. They force me into the present.

Also like poetry, hockey requires a lot of balance. The most important balance is that between yourself and the team. I think something all serious athletes learn young is the give and take between fun and discipline. A real hockey player understands the satisfaction of a hard skate, of blocking a shot, of taking a hit to chip the puck out, of a timely backcheck, and they understand how each individual play is like a puzzle piece. They understand that if each kid plays his role and puts in his piece, the team will benefit. There’s kind of a morality to it — you do what’s best for your teammates, for the greater good, even if it means you get none of the glory.

Some kids only have fun scoring goals. I do not understand these people any more than I understand Swahili. But some kids, you could tell, saw the game that same way, got the quiet satisfaction from forcing a guy offsides on a 3-on-2. I run into these people, and years later, we still have a bond.

And then there are the emotional balances – between the toughness of the game and love for your teammates, between the passion that almost eats you up you want to be out there so bad, and the focus to execute and play well – and what’s a truer image of all these balances then a player barreling full speed into the corner on two quarter inches of steel?

From 4-19, hockey was the center of my universe. I was obsessed, and it was an obsession that filled my lungs and made me buoyant whenever life threatened to drown me in its undertow: when I changed schools, when my dad had an anyeurism, when my parents divorced, when I got my heart broken, hockey was there to lean into and love. It gave me a whole world of peace, and I gave it every bit of me back.

This is something I carry today, and quality that defines me. I can’t do anything halfway, whether it’s running, writing, thinking, music, capture the flag — if I’m into it, I’m obsessed. I go all out. I need adrenaline in my life. I need the thrill and sense of doing something important, something that means something, and it doesn’t matter that I was never going to the NHL. Hockey meant everything to me. And once you’ve felt that everything, and don’t have it anymore, there’s a hole. I’ve stuffed a million different things into that hole – track and field and traveling and being drunk on the beach in the dark and skinny dipping and punk shows and sleeping for 15 hours and cliff jumping in upstate NY and skydiving and driving cross-country and books and staying up till the sun comes up twice – nothing is quite the same size and shape as my beloved hockey.

***

Hockey is one of the first things I tried to write about, and I’ve tried to write about it a bunch of times, and I never quite nail it, you know, I always feel like there’s something about it slipping away, some truth to it; I got that feeling last year when me and Joe were watching the playoffs and talking hockey and gushing over the beauty of some goal while our girlfriends tried to humor us and understand (and did, after watching 20+ games).

And when you try to hard to put your finger on what you’re missing, you’re lost, and that’s what I kind of am after leaving hockey, that thing that defined me for so long, the rock of my identity, my first love who I’m still learning to let go of and carry with me forever at the same time.

This awkward reaching brings my mind to learning how to skate — being about 2 feet tall, pushing around those stupid push-sleds and falling on my ass all the time, skating like those kids in high school you’d go to open skate with and would be clinging to the boards and you’re like “Oh, not so easy, is it?”, while weaving in and out of people wearing rental skates, feeling like the second coming of Bobby Orr.

The thing is, I don’t even remember learning how to skate. As far as my memory is concerned, it’s something natural, some heirloom, a gift.

And here I am thinking about my first few years of life without hockey, trying to figure shit out, looking at all the times I’ve fallen on my ass and clung to the boards like I’ve never even heard the word “zamboni”, learning how to skate all over again and thinking “Man, it’s not so easy, is it?”

^^ Goalies also have the most bizarre personalities in the world.

-by Kevin Leonard (not Dillion or CJ Totillo)