Hockey

By Goo

Written 10/17/06

This past Saturday a couple of my friends and I got the opportunity to go to a hockey game with our youth pastor, Al. It was my first time going to a sporting event at any level higher than minor league baseball, and it was only the second hockey game I had ever watched. Needless to say, it was quite an experience.

I am guessing that this is pretty much always true, but watching hockey was a whole lot more fun live than it had been on TV. You could really hear the thud of the player getting checked into the boards, the skates as they cut on the ice.

It is also quite a bit different from football, because there is always a lot of action. I frequently found myself missing something somewhere because I was too busy watching the puck and missed somebody getting beaten into the boards on a different end of the rink. At times I was surprised that the ferocity exhibited was even legal. Don’t get me wrong it was awesome, but compared to the sports that I’m used to watching on TV and such it was brutal. Even in football flags are called on every little thing, and in basketball or soccer or ultimate frissbee, contact is strictly prohibited. Yet in hockey there’ll be two or three players just grappling for the control of the puck for an extended period of time and just getting viscious. I wish we had a hockey team in Neillsville, because that looks like a sport I could get into! One of the main reasons I do “extreme” sports such as skiing and mountainboarding is because of the almost total absence of rules. (And when I mountainboard, there are no rules at all; so that totally suits me. I should go mountainboarding tomorrow.)

The other thing that really impressed me was how involved the student section got. It was like me at a concert, only about 1,500x or so and at a sporting event. They spent more time standing and dancing than they did in their seats. Significantly more, actually. (Wow, big words don’t really fit this thingy I’m writing.) They really got into it. Now if we had all those students getting that into it in a mosh pit... THAT would be intense! It would be like moshing madness: mosh-tastic.

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