The Game I'll Never Forget - VI - The Dark Ages

So there I was in Maine. MAINE! Ice country! Hockey! Nope. To my astonishment, my classmates who were primarily from the New England area were mostly basketball fans and football fans. Even in Maine, of all places. They thought that someone who grew up in California like me with such a love of the game was intriguing.

UNECOM didn't have a team that I knew of or that was advertised anywhere. Then one day I saw a flyer posted on the small bulletin board about a roller hockey team that was forming. Would I play? Sure, why not? It'd be a nice break from the constant studying. So I asked Mom and Dad to send me my hockey gear via mail (it was a huge package) and got ready for a game.

This was a league, we'd be wearing uniforms, playing in a rink, with score keepers, timers, and refs, etc. We had never played or practiced as a team, there was no talk of strategy, positioning, or anything. Oddly enough, I was the old-timer veteran on the team, too at the ripe old age of 27. Everyone else was 19-20.

Anyway, the arena was huge and there were multiple teams, bright lights, a REAL scoreboard, etc. It looked great! But when I got in the rink and started playing....ew! I hadn't played in months. Worse yet, I've never played with this bunch before. Needless to say I was probably the worst one out there. But was I really? At least I had the team mentality: I skated hard every shift and when I got tired I got off. These other kids I played with would stay out on their shift forever, get tired, stop trying and float. It was frustrating.

I played 2-3 games but the fun just wasn't there. The lines didn't roll as they should have, games were irregular, and I had very little playing time. The 45 minute drive to play 5-10 minutes/game wasn't worth it, so I basically stopped going to the games and concentrated on school, instead.

So there it was. I was on extended hiatus, my nose was in a book all the time, and I didn't even have time to watch games. That is except for the 1998 Olympics. To make things worse, Canada didn't even do well in the tournament.

My involvement in hockey continued to deteriorate as my academic career progressed to internship and residency. Hockey took a far back seat for the next 4 years.

It wasn't until my last year in Chicago that I had finally found a rink close by (relatively). Proximity was a major issue because traffic in Chicagoland is horrid! I'm sure there were rinks an hour away in the suburbs, but who wanted to spend a whole half of a day for a hockey game? And the rink I did find only had hockey leagues at the most inconvenient times. Besides, I had boards to study for and jobs to check out.

This was definitely hockey's darkest hour in my personal history.