In the winters of our childhood, and late autumns and early springs as well, every day after school and all through weekends, our little street in Toronto’s east end might as well have been Maple Leaf Gardens or the Montreal Forum.

We were part of the ball-hockey legions who turned the cry “Car!” into as Canadian an icon as the call of a loon. Looking back, how innocent we were of all that we were learning while simply having fun.

What delightful news, then, to learn that Toronto city council decided Friday to alter rules that had threatened road hockey and, in contemporary times, basketball as well.

Play will be allowed on roads with speed limits of 40 km/h or less during daylight hours between 9 a.m. and 8 p.m. Nets will now be allowed on the road as long as they don’t block driveways or impede sightlines for cars and pedestrians. They must be removed when play is done.

None but the dullest of bureaucrats could ever have imagined that all that was going on in those games was play.

In our scrappy battles of long ago, the bands of brothers in our working-class neighbourhood learned to collaborate, learned how to settle grievances, let our imaginations roam in outfitting ourselves and adapting scrap found in backyards into hockey gear.

Before games started, we claimed what team we were and what player we’d be that day. Whoever we were, we played so much and so fiercely the tennis balls we used were worn bare. We called them “burners.” Anyone hit by a slaphot would understand why.

Our wooden sticks were worn down until the blades resembled a fencer’s épée. (Happily, the East General Hospital was not far away.)

The goalies — usually the youngest brothers — used baseball gloves to catch, and we taped squares of cardboard to their stick-hand hockey glove to make blockers.

Goalie pads made their inaugural appearance the day a neighbour threw out chesterfield cushions stuffed with foam.

When no ball could be found, we scattered to the laneways, scavenging for pop bottles, which could be returned to the store for the deposit — two cents for a small one, a nickel for family size.

We knew where the older kids hung out and such treasure could usually be found. It seldom took long to raise the necessary funds before zipping to the local “smoke-shop” for balls.

How wonderful the day that some homeowner junked an old mantelpiece essentially made of chalk. With it, we drew a centre-ice logo on the road and traced goalkeeper’s creases around the piles of leaves or snow that served as goalposts.

Of course, once we had a real crease imaginary nets would hardly do.

In someone’s father’s garage, we found the scrap two-by-fours from a long-ago home-improvement project. We fashioned them into 6-by-4 foot frames. The game was underway. Until someone had another brilliant idea.

Mothers were asked if they had any old bedsheets. From various houses, in different colours, the threadbare sheets (on which some of us might very well have been conceived) were donated.

We taped them together, nailed them to the frame of the goal and, gosh, if it didn’t look more or less like the same thing Johnny Bower guarded.

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We played for hours, from meal to meal, mothers all but requiring the jaws-of-life to separate us from the contests long enough to wolf down lunch or supper.

By day’s end, no matter the score, it was: “Next goal wins!”

Rare was the occasion any adult intervened to provide instruction. Grown-ups had their world. This was ours.

Some neighbours cheerfully tossed errant balls back to us from their front yards. Some properties owned, we figured, by cranks had to be crept into furtively.

Once in a very blue moon, the nose of a yellow police cruiser would turn south onto our street.

“Cops!” we yelled. And in the days before the building of the nets, we’d scatter.

Imagine our delight the day we built those nets when a cruiser pulled over and the officers got out to study our handiwork.

“Nice job, boys,” one said as they pulled away.

And the whacking and clacking of sticks on asphalt — a backbeat to the soundtrack of our youth — resumed.

As the Fathers of Confederation surely intended it.

And our mothers definitely approved.