You win some, you lose some...

Well, it was, hmmm, what was it exactly?  

A good game?  No.  A bad game?  No.

I was dirty, it was chippy, their mouths were non stop, and they proved that they are hands down, the team with the least amount of class in ANY league that I have ever played in.  The end of the game turned into a bench clear with about forty seconds to go, and in an effort to prove what little class they had, they started yelling at our fans in the stands.

Seriously.  Yelling at mothers, girlfriends, sisters...  Classless.  One of their players actually picked up the puck and threw it at one of our wingers.  Who the fuck does that?  Classless. They weren't even going to line up and shake hands, as has been the custom for decades in hockey.  They have one player on that team that I respect, I called him over to shake his hand, and it was then that they realized that they should in fact line up and shake hands.  When the goaltender from the losing team is the first guy, in the middle of a bench clearing tussle (because it wasn't a brawl) to extend his hand and say, "Good game," that's when you know that its time to man up, to stop being a bunch of little punks and return the afore mentioned sentiment.  

(For people who know me, for my teammates, for the players on the teams that I compete against, they know that I am fiercely competitive and may just be one of the biggest sore losers on the planet.  I accept that about myself, I hate to fucking lose, at anything, to anyone. Ever.  For me, when someone says, "It's just a game, and that I shouldn't care about losing" needs to fuck off.  There is only one kind of person in the world that is ok with losing.  A loser.)  

Just the same, I love the game of hockey, I respect the game of hockey and its traditions.  The line, the hand shake, it's one of hockey's greatest.  You spend an hour kicking the shit out of each other, and then, at the end, you line up, and shake hands, and say "good game" whether you want to or not.  At the end of a game like that I'd rather line up and tell them all to fuck off and punch them all in the teeth sure, but that's not our team, that's not the way that we play.  So we manned up, we shook the hand of the team that beat us, because when that final buzzer sounds, that's what you do.  And we did.

So we didn't win.  I wanted to sure, our team wanted to, but we didn't pull it out last night.  

Winter League starts in 3 weeks...