It’s hard to explain why it is that I like hockey, but I do. It makes more sense to explain it now that I’m here in Vancouver. The thing is, I’m from Iowa. Hockey isn’t apart of the vocabulary though. To most Iowans, hockey is an extreme form of football. It’s on ice, moves back and forth far too quickly, and requires less pads. It’s the skating part that gets a lot of people.
Until the invention of rollerblades, the only skating that ever occurred was usually with roller skates down at your local roller rink. The one in my hometown was more barn-like than an actual building. I think it might still be there, but it’s no longer in operation. For the most part, it was where the kiddies went and “hooked up” with their respective boyfriend and girlfriend. That alone was able to create a lot of gossip regarding who was skating with who. Skating with someone other than your significant was considered cheating.
It was totally NHL ’93 on the Sega CD… yes, I was one of about fifteen people who owned a Sega CD… *cough*… that got me to fall in love with the game. This was when I discovered that this guy, Patrick Roy, was unstoppable if you played against Montreal. To combat my frustration of always losing against the Habs, I became them. I ruled season after season. It was amazing, and I got so into the game and learned all of the little tricks that even Roy had a fair number of assists and a handful of goals on the season. It wasn’t cheating, but my friends thought different.
Why hockey never caught on where I grew up, I’ll never be able to really say. Iowa isn’t devoid of the sport, it’s just not a priority. I like football, love baseball, and have little interest for basketball, unless it’s the Iowa Hawkeyes of course. A small group of my friends from my hometown got together in the summer of ’98 to play a reckless form of rollerhockey from time to time. We were never that good, but we loved it. Dying in the sweltering heat, it was fun… for the twenty minutes it lasted and until someone felt like they were going to pass out. I wouldn’t say that any of us were in shape at the time either.
From what I understand, the summer after we stopped playing in the church parking lot across the street from my house, a group of teenagers tried to keep up with what we started. For the most part, I heard they were successful. That was until they busted a window in the priest’s house. After that, all hockey was banned from that parking lot. I like to think that I had a hand in that, but not in the part that includes me with the guilty party responsible for breaking the window. The other part. The one where I kinda started something. Yeah. That one.
i miss you