hockey update

We won our playoff final last night (4-3), so we are the champeens of our division. We got a little plaque and a warm feeling. Plus our picture taken.

It was an ugly game. I think we had 19 minutes of penalties. One of our guys got tossed for fighting, and he deserved it. He had words with another guy, and the next thing you know, he's punching the guy in the head. It wasn't a real hockey fight (ie, he left his gloves on, and he didn't pull the other guy's helmet off, just punched him thru his cage) but it still rocked the guy and he took a while getting up.

The other team was annoyed, and so was the rest of ours. Fighting has a place in hockey, in certain leagues and at certain levels. Sometimes you have to send a message; sometimes you need your grinder to go out there and mix it up with their grinder to stop their momentum and get you back in the game.

But this is rec hockey -- we paid to be out there. There's contact, but there's not supposed to be any actual hitting, and at our level there's no need for fighting. We've all got jobs we have to go to in the morning, for Pete's sake.

Anyway, in the last 5 minutes of the game we killed 4 minutes of a 5-on-3 power play, and then another minute of 5-on-4, to hold on to our one-goal lead and get the win. Our goalie stood on his head again, and worked hard on defense. We ran quick D-shifts -- 30 to 40 seconds -- every time we cleared the puck we switched, and everybody skated their butts off trying to shut them down in our zone.

Okay, I realize that wasn't interesting, but it was fun for me to re-live it for a minute. You may now continue with your regularly-scheduled lives.