It was Saturday, Dec. 16, 2017, and 75 degrees outside the LongHorn Steakhouse at the Tampa Premium Outlets. Bernard Skerkowski, an accountant, was running late. When he arrived with his partner, Lisa Wycoff, they ordered “the usual,” a rum and Diet Coke and a Cosmo. “We’re not alcoholics,” Skerkowski clarified. “But once you see these guys, you’ll know why we need a drink.”

The guys in question were fellow members of the Tampa Bay Curling Club. Skerkowski, its 58-year-old founder, grew up playing the sport in Canada before moving in the early 1990s to Florida, where expanses of ice are as exotic as man-eating reptiles are commonplace. Two and a half decades later, when he heard that a huge skating complex would be opening in nearby Wesley Chapel, Skerkowski started ordering equipment and plotting to reserve three hours of weekly rink time, which the facility priced at $450 per hour. He would persuade a few dozen snowbirds to join him or eat his investment. In fact, when he offered demonstrations early last year to gauge interest, more than a hundred Floridians signed up: big, small, old, young, athletic, arthritic. All they had in common was their raw enthusiasm for the sport, matched by their near-total ignorance of how to play it.

Skerkowski — whose own imposing physique belies his gracefulness on ice — resolved to teach them. He arrived early to make sure a Zamboni driver flooded the surface, which mitigates skate scars (a stray hair can redirect a stone), and to help bolt starting-block-like “hacks” into place. Then, using a hose from a shoulder-borne water pack, he sprinkled the frozen surface, creating “pebbles” for the rocks to slide on. When the curious recruits arrived, he gave them lessons in how to crouch, push off from a hack and deliver a 42-pound stone, diamond-cut from one of the world’s only two quarries, in Wales and Scotland, that have the right quality of granite; how to “sweep” the ice with a broom to make the rock go farther and straighter while en route to the bull’s-eye-like “house.” By last September, he had trained enough beginners to hold an actual league season. Now, just three months later, several of his more ambitious disciples were eager to enter national tournaments, or “bonspiels.” When Skerkowski gently encouraged them to focus on gaining experience, he began to hear rumors of an imminent leadership coup.

“Their etiquette isn’t quite there,” he said. “The thing is, they’re so excited about the rocks and the house, they stand up close looking at it, which you’re not allowed to do. The other thing is cutting across the ice. And you sort of don’t cheer for bad things to happen to the other team’s stone. But tell that to people who want their team to win. Oh, my God, there’s a big learning curve. I think in retrospect I made a mistake. I have this trophy that everyone is vying for, and I think I shouldn’t have done that. It’s not about the cheap-ass trophy.”

What none of his would-be usurpers knew was that between equipment, national club dues, ice time, beer and pizza, Skerkowski had poured at least $10,000 of his own money into the enterprise. “Bernie Skerkowski is the Tampa Curling Club,” he said. “Bernie could make it all go away. I’m looking for fun. I’m looking for learning, for people to have a good time — not all this crazy competition-type thing.”

Scottish farmers are said to have invented curling in the 15th or 16th century, sliding water-worried channel stones over their frozen bogs. The sport appeared in modern form in the first Winter Olympics in 1924 before disappearing from the Games as a medal sport for the next 74 years. Its reappearance in 1998 was more fortuitous: When clouds enveloped the ski slopes of Nagano, Japan, TV stations scrambling for broadcast-worthy content discovered that curling produced solid ratings. The sport’s viewership swelled during its subsequent Salt Lake City outing. From semiarid and subtropical armchairs across the land, there arose a common refrain: “I could do that.”

Over the last 15 years, membership in the United States Curling Association doubled to 20,000. As Kate Caithness, the president of the World Curling Federation, put it to me recently: “The U.S., you are our sleeping giant. The sleeping giant has woken up.” Afghanistan, Brazil, Guyana, Mexico, Mongolia, Qatar and Saudi Arabia have also begun to embrace the sport, whose chief appeal may lie in its ability to revive a singular crushed dream: “You see ice dance or skiing and think, I’ll never be an Olympic champion,” Caithness says. “But curling, you can.”

Skerkowski is counting on this year’s Games to spur hundreds of Tampa residents to join his club. In anticipation, he will forgo league play for the summer to offer more beginner clinics. He dreams of soon having a rink with dedicated curling ice, perfect, unscarred by hockey skates. More people could play — and practice, which, because of scheduling and cost restrictions, is impossible now.

“You got my drink?” Skerkowski called to Lisa, having repaired from the LongHorn to the skate complex, where they set about unloading equipment from the bed of his pickup. “This is Diet Coke,” Wycoff said, handing him a travel mug.

“Because I am an old man, this is Captain Morgan and Diet Coke,” Skerkowski said as they crossed the parking lot and entered the facility. “Hello, guys!” he bellowed at no one in particular. “Curling night! Curling night!”

Eager to help him set up were two young fathers whose purple pants featured cats shooting lightning bolts out of their paws. “Bernie said: ‘You want to be different. You want to stand out,’ ” one of them, Jason Wagner, explained. “So I got on Amazon and I looked up ‘wild curling pants,’ and these are the ones that came up.”

Their squad watched the United States Olympic team trials in Omaha, Neb., on TV. “We were studying it so hard,” Wagner said. “We would spend the entire night talking about it.”

“He will not do anything but this,” Amanda, Wagner’s wife said.

“You never know,” Wagner went on. “We might have new dreams of taking it all the way. We could be the first team from Wesley Chapel, Fla. — ”

“Two thousand forty-seven!” his teammate Jimmy Burd interrupted. (There will not, in fact, be a Winter Olympics in 2047.) “This is how unknown it is,” Burd said. “I have a bunch of friends in the area. I told them, ‘Hey, does anyone want to help sponsor our curling team?’ And somebody actually said to me, ‘Like biceps curls?’ ”

“Ladies and gentlemen! May I have your attention, please?” Skerkowski’s voice ricocheted off the boards. He called roll for the teams and informed them that the pitchers of beer being carted out onto the ice were courtesy of the club. (Pairing curling and imbibing is tradition, presumably begun with Scotch.) “I’m so excited,” he continued. “Look at this beautiful trophy. That’s solid gold. At least that’s what I reported on my tax returns.”

“He’s Canadian,” someone whispered meaningfully.

Scott Gargasz, one of the club’s only experienced players, passed around copies of a booklet he wrote for the league, “Curling Rules and Etiquette.” Skerkowski encouraged everyone to read it and offer feedback. “Remember, despite what you all think, it’s not about Bernie. It’s about the Tampa Bay Curling Club and making the sport of curling a better place for everyone in Tampa Bay,” he said by way of adjournment. There was a general hurrah, and then the teams took the ice.

Before long, the cumulative shushing sounds of stones over pebbled ice, like that of waves on a beach, suffused the arena. Unlike other pastimes in which players alternate between inactivity and rolling (bowling), tossing (cornhole) or pushing (shuffleboard) roundish projectiles at a target, all four teammates participate in delivering all the team’s stones.

Joy and Dennis Meyers, who identified themselves as the club’s No. 1 (and so far only) fans, came every weekend to cheer for their son, Michael, 42, and grandson, Chris, 15. “This is a fun league, I’ll tell you what,” Dennis said. “What I like about it is there’s no hotheads.”

After two hours, a 10-minute warning bell signaled the final throws of the night; winners and losers alike then headed to the bar upstairs for a club-sponsored pizza party. Except for Skerkowski himself, who lingered, as was his habit, to bait bystanders with a free tutorial.

“The rock is going to pull you down the ice — look up!” he hollered at one participant. “You’re always looking up! Look at that! Woooo!”

“You’re afraid to push off because you might hurt yourself, right?” he asked another, adding, without a trace of sarcasm, “It’s O.K. to be scared.”

When it was finally time to cede the ice, he shooed away this latest batch of doubtless future Olympic hopefuls. “Now,” he informed them, “we go drink.”