For the love of the game...

I started playing hockey at the age of twelve, and I am thirty-two now, so simple math leads us to the conclusion that for more than half of my life I have been playing hockey.  In all of that time I have only managed but a mere handful of times to venture out of the little blue box painted about an inch under the ice to play a forward position.  I've spent twenty years receiving nothing but (as Gerry Cheevers put it in his book "Goaltender) "the one 'A,' as in abuse."  

Now don't get me wrong, I love the game, I always have and I always will.  For guys like me, and the men on the teams I play for, our love of the game runs as deeply as it can, because, honestly, when you get to a certain age, and all of your parts don't work the way they did when you were eighteen, it's that deep rooted love that carries you, that keeps you playing.

The problem for a stiff like me is that our collective "oldness" tends to cause certain, um, "defensive lapses..."  Or rather a complete and total lack of defense at all.  And summer men's league is a tricky sort of deal, because a lot of the teams are loaded with young college players, or former pros who have summer homes on the Cape...  The teams I play on, well, not so much.   I play on 2 solid teams, with solid players, but we just can't seem to get it together, and it's starting to wear on me.  

So I am hoping that this little experiment, that writing about my woes and occasional successes on the ice, help to bring me even the smallest slice of something that amounts to piece of mind.  Maybe in recounting my games, here in writing, I'll be able to better see what exactly is going wrong with both me, and with my team...