Summer Hockey

On August 12th I tidied up at the cottage and hit the road for home at about 1:30 in the afternoon.  The drive home that normally takes about three hours, took almost six hours this time.  A tractor trailer had rolled on Highway 2 northbound, just at the south edge of Leduc, where it merges with Highway 2A.  Traffic was backed up for miles.  The highway was completely blocked and being detoured into Leduc.  This also affected southbound traffic merging onto 2A, and northbound traffic on 2A.  Essentially three highways were being merged onto a single lane road through Leduc.  I finally made it back home to the city at around 7:00PM.  I quickly unpacked my gear and got ready to go and play hockey.

This summer season was very unusual.  It was the first time back on the ice since Covid and our team had not played for about a nine months.  We started off the season with a very one-sided loss to a team from River Cree.  The score in that one was 13-0.  The next game was also a loss, but this time a little more respectable one goal game.  Our third game ended in a tie.  After that we were moved down, along with the teams we played in the second and third game, to Division Five, the lowest division.  The River Cree team was moved up to the second division.  After that we never lost a game and finished the season with a record of nine wins, two losses and a tie.  I don't think we ever had more than about a dozen players show up for a game and several times the team played with only seven or eight skaters.  I missed a number of games with everything that I had going on out at the cottage.

On August 5th the team played the semi-final game against the 4th [last] place team, the Punishers.  I didn't make it to this game, and neither did most of our other players.  The guys hung on for a 9-6 victory with only seven skaters.  The final game was on August 12th at 9:45PM at Londonderry Arena.  This was against a team called the Party Sharks.  These guys finished in second place and knocked off the third place Mighty Ducks to advance to the final.  We had ten skaters for the game, but only one defensemen... me... showed up for the game.  We had to play with three forwards moved back to the blue line.  We scored the first goal, about half way through the first period, and never looked back.  The game ended with a scrum and a fight after one of the Party Sharks took a swipe at one of the girls on our team.  Two of our guys were ejected from the game with about five minutes left and unfortunately were left out of the team victory picture.  We ended up winning by a score of 6-0.