Sunday, September 26, 2021

Renegades - Winter Hockey

We are now three games in to the winter hockey season.  At this early point in the season we are in first place.  We had a good turnout for our first game and defeated the Showboats by a score of 7-2.  Then the Provincial Government announced [finally!] some pandemic restrictions.  Our province of Alberta is in a state of chaos with the literal collapse of our health care system.  The fourth wave of the pandemic is resulting in huge case numbers and many hospitalizations, almost exclusively among those that are not vaccinated.  On September 20th a vaccine policy went into place and people need to show proof of vaccination to do a lot of things... including play hockey.
It turns out that eight of the 21 members of my team were not vaccinated, much to my disappointment.  They are all ineligible to play until they get the shot and wait the mandatory two weeks for their immunity to build.  As a result we had to play our second game with a very short bench.  We only had nine skaters... six forwards and three defense.  But, we hung on for a 4-4 tie against a team called Demolition.  These guys were in first place at the time.
On September 25th we played our third game of the season against the Cougar Collision Flyers.  We had a few more guys out for this game, but the bench was still not full.  It was a hard fought game with the score very close.  Neither team was up by more than a goal until late in the game.  Despite taking some late penalties and the Flyers having a two man advantage, we hung on for a 5-3 victory.



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