CHAMPS!!!

Well I did it. 3 days of intense hockey: warm up, stretch, ice time, eat, rest, recover. This was the seemingly unending cycle for 72 hours. It was a blast. Definitely a "checkbox checked" on the list of cool life experiences.

Friday was drills, practice, chalk talk, practice, scrimmage games. Saturday was a round robin tournament to seed teams for Sunday's championship tourney. We finished out 2-0-1 Saturday for No. 1 seed. I (as well as everybody) was cooked both Friday and Saturday night.

To Mellon Arena Sunday. Body says "no!", brain says "go!".We watched 2 v. 3 in the first game. 2 dominates; clearly the team to beat. On they go to the championship game. But first things first - we have our own 1 v. 4 semi-final to get through. We handle this team again fairly easily with a 6-1 win. A memory from this game that I'll never forget (remember this is full-on Mellon Arena hockey - jumbotron, replays, announcers, music, the works): The booming announcement of the game's first goal went like this: "The Chinstrap's goal! scored by the Ol' 2-9er! PHILLLLL BOURRRRRRRRRQE!!! Assisted by number 16, KEN DE-FURYYYYYY-O! Time of the goal 6:19 - DeFurio to Bourque!" Awesome.

Brief recovery while the consolation game is played. Championship game starts at 9:30pm. A battle royale, start to finish. I had the fortune of scoring the first goal of the game on a great pass from the blue line from one of our young defensemen. Another indelible memory - scoring a goal in a championship game on Mellon Arena ice. So we fought hard the rest of the way. So did they. If you've never played hockey it's hard to describe the intensity, speed, and emotion through the game's ebbs and flows. Just surreal. We win 5-4 on a Bourqie game-winning goal with 3:00 minutes to go. Held off our opponent's empty-net assault in the final 2 minutes for the win.

So yes there is a cool cup/trophy on which all the winners' names are engraved. They presented the trophy followed by guys hoisting the cup, team photos, equipment everywhere, guys getting pictures with their wives and kids, etc. The guys were just, well, stoked. But through most of the revelry I quietly skated a few laps around the Igloo, soaking it all in and thinking about the likely hundreds of events I've been to in this soon to be memory of a facility. Learning to skate and to play this game as an adult made it all the more unlikely that I should find myself here. Plus I got to share it all with my hockey buddy Bret who just lit it up the entire weekend.

The folks from work who gave me this gift - and attended the semi-final game as huge fans - have no idea what a gift this was.