Free Hockey Dreams by David Adams Richards

neck on the crossbar again, and suddenly, Tuff, with an insane moral gesture, awards us a penalty shot.
    He put the puck on centre ice and gave the nod to the fastest, largest player on our team, Phillip Luff.
    Phillip had all the tools in the world to play a great game of hockey, but hadn’t the brain. He would end up becoming a bongo player, dress in a flowered shirt, wearing a headband to keep the brushcut out of his eyes.
    Phillip started from behind his own goal without the puck and skated to centre ice where the puck was sitting. He had picked up an enormous amount of speed by this time. He was, in the parlance, a “skatin’ fool.”
    At centre ice Phillip winds up and takes a slapshot.
    It blisters by their goalie and hits the post.
    “Damn,” Phillip’s father says, and begins to clap.
    Phillip, grinning from ear to ear, skates off.
    His father waves.
    “Hi daddy,” Phillip says, waving back.
    Everyone sits at the bench with their head down.
    It took me a year to get over that game against my cousin’s team. When we lost the Canada Cup to the Russians in 1981 I refused to watch hockey (I cheated during the playoffs) until we won it back in 1984. This was somewhat how I felt back then in the early winter of 1961.
    Or
worse
. I actually felt worse on both these occasions than I can ever describe. I felt like I was to feel after the
first
game in 1972. How can one describe it? How can one describe the feeling I had? Well I will tell you how it was.
    Do you remember the battle of Cannae in 218 B.C.? Yes. It was just like that — 2,300 years can’t erase how the Romans must have felt after Hannibal crushed their army at Cannae. When the Romans sent scouts out of Rome to see how the army did, and stragglers met them saying, “There is no army now.”
    It was a feeling just like that. There was an utter silence. The Yanks had beaten us. The Yanks who didn’t even consider hockey a sport had come into our home town where hockey was eveything in the world and had beaten us.
    Worse I had bragged to my cousin about the NHL and that when the NHL needed hockey players they came to Canada and got hockey players like me (stupid, stupid, stupid).
    My cousin had scored the winning goal. They had all cheered him and lifted him up and hugged him and he received a trophy. He came home and handed the trophy to me, to let me feel it, once, before he whisked it away, winking and smiling.
    Suddenly it occurred to me that I had grown a beard as I sat in the den. I had become a southern rebel in April of 1865. We all had beards, my brother, mother, father and I sitting about listening to the yanks talk.
    “Boys you played a good game,” my uncle said to my brother blowing smoke rings above his head. He couldn’t help but smile, and he was so patient and kind to me. It wasas if I was talking to some Federal cavalry officer who was allowing me to keep my horse because I would have to go back home to plow my field.
    “We put up a good fight didn’t we,” I said, trying once again for that old delightful bravado I could exhibit at times.
    “You fought all the way,” he said.
    You’ll find in situations like this when the defeated boys want to talk the victors always want to change the subject. So suddenly my uncle was talking to my cousin about going home. Getting back to their lives, to his wife and children, being just an ordinary person again.
    “Oh you don’t have to go yet,” my mother said, scratching her beard. My father too, smoothed his beard with his hand. My brother, wounded, his cheek bandaged, hobbled about in an old rebel stovepipe hat, right in front of my eyes, as snow, delicious Canadian snow, fell in the damnable darkness outside.
    But if you are already on the outside then things don’t matter. If you are never a part of the fraternity then what does it matter if the fraternity loses?
    I don’t think Michael felt like this, just as the Maritimes never felt like this towards Canada, yet I think this was