Free Reality Check in Detroit by Roy Macgregor

them. Sarah was first to check the others, and she deftly knocked a saucer pass from Smitty to Alex out of the air and gobbled it up with her feet. Smitty scowled. Now he was the checker, and the puck flew around the circle as he attempted to intercept. Travis was impressed at what a terrific passer Alex was.
    Eventually, Smitty caught a pass from Travis by going down and extending his stick along the ice. He finally smiled – or perhaps it was more a sneer.
    Travis was now the checker. It was harder than it looked. He would go toward one of the three, and just when he thought he had them covered, they would slip a pass to someone who was open. And the three passers kept circling around the face-off circle so that they were always finding new positions. Travis went down to block passes and failed. He tried poke-checking and failed. He went down on his stomach and stabbed, and failed. In the end, he clipped a puck out of the air and it was Alex’s turn.
    Alex stuck out her bottom lip in a hurt expression. Travis felt bad.… No, he felt
great.
    Soon the whistle blew and they all stopped. Men wearing tracksuits and skates tagged winners from the various Pig in the Middle groups. From Travis’s group they chose Alex. He thought she deserved it.
    Next up was the Longest Slide. Each player was to skate to the first blue line as fast as he or she could and then go down. The one who slid the farthest was the winner. Sarah and Dmitri, the Owls’ two fastest skaters, made it all the way to the icing line before they stopped. Nish, the heaviest skater, made it to the far face-off circle. But Smitty, who dived straight to his stomach rather than falling first to his knees, was still moving fast when he knocked into the far boards. He was immediately declared the winner.
    Soon after, Travis saw the Owls’ coach walk away from his post leaning on the rink boards. Even from a distance, Travis could tell that Muck was shaking his head. This wasn’t hockey. But it sure was fun.
    Next was the Bouncing Puck competition. The organizers selected six players – three Owls, Fahd, Sam, Wilson, and three Motors, including the one called Wi-Fi – to dress in bizarre “puck” outfits. They looked like spacemen, but with huge inner tubes around their middles that were supposed to look like pucks. They were told to race once around the entire rink and were free to “bump” at will.
    Travis had never seen anything quite so funny in his life. When the bouncing puck that was Fahd tried to bounce into one of the Motors, it looked like he’d just bounced off a trampoline. Poor Fahd went flying in the opposite direction and hit the ice, where he struggled like an upside-down turtle to get back on his skates.
    Down the ice the other contestants went, the “pucks” bouncing off each other like pinballs. At the far net, they got into a traffic jam, and only Wilson and one of the Motors got out of it without wiping out. It ended with a race to the finish. Wilson thought he’d try Smitty’s trick and he dived as he approached the blue line, only his inner tube acted like a brake and stalled him a good six feet from the finish. The Motors’ “puck” won easily.
    Then they competed for the Ice Break Dancing crown. Loud rap music pumped through the speakers, echoing off the Ford mansion and the nearby trees, while all the players tried the wildest dance moves ever seen on a hockey rink.
    Nish was center stage, surrounded by cameras. But so, too, was Smitty, who really could breakdance and was showing some amazingly athletic moves. The organizers went around the rink tapping various players, taking them out of the contest, until they had cleared the ice of all but two competitors, Nish and Smitty.
    They cranked up the music even louder, the bass notes crashing off the Ford mansion like cannon fire. Nish was sweating like a pig, but he was dancing as if his life depended on it, even pulling off a pretty fair moonwalk on his skates.
    Smitty, however,