The Official Web Site of The Hill School Hockey Association
Memory Lane
Wherein we publish your fondly remembered tales of hockey exploits and related ephemera from years gone by. We welcome your submissions. Please e-mail your articles to Ice Chips editor-in-chief, Rob Isham.
contents:
- posted: 2010-01-27 - The Amazing History of Hill Hockey -- In Photos
- posted: 2009-09-28 - A Skate with “Leapin’ Lou”
- posted: 2009-09-26 - My Most Memorable Game
- posted: 2008-12-01 - Remembering Ned Hall
- posted: 2008-11-10 - Hill’s First Rink Dedication Speaker Was a Stanley Cup Winner
- posted: 2007-01-10 - Old Skates
The Amazing History of Hill Hockey -- In Photos
The Winningest Team in Hill Hockey History - 1976-1977
The HHA has uploaded and posted incredible new files of hockey team photos and action shots going back to the early nineteenth century. Nate Yinger '05 worked on the project most of the summer and pulled off the impossible. It\'s an amazing walk through time and we're sure you'll enjoy the journey.
Just click on the Gallery link and go to Team Photos. Look for your team, your teammates and your friends while cruising through the amazing history of Hill Hockey!
Please help us identify the players. We need help with that! And share with us any photographs you might have. We've also been grinding on our For the Record section, a work in progress, where team and individual records are posted. If you have any stats to bring to our attention, please do! That goes for the Trophy Room section as well.
Huge thanks to both Nate Yinger '05 and webmaster Stan Frantz '71 for all their work!
A Skate with “Leapin’ Lou”
As of 2009 the National Hockey League has 30 teams. You may know, have met or even been one of its more than 600 players. They are an elite group, to be sure, but hardly as rare as when I played hockey for The Hill in 1952-56. There were but six NHL teams then with no American players. Not even goaltenders wore helmets, so if you went to a game or watched on television, players were easy to recognize.
That may help to explain why the memory of my workout with “Leapin’ Lou” Fontinato remains so vivid.
On the morning in December 1955 before Hill’s afternoon game with St. Marks in the old Madison Square Garden, our team gathered for a brief skate to shake out the Christmas cobwebs and familiarize ourselves with the rink. Because I seldom left any ice until kicked off, I lingered afterward, fooling around with a puck, imagining how those towering ranks of seats must look from the playing surface when jammed with fans.
Presently, a skater whom I recognized as Fontinanto, a Ranger defenseman of moderate skills, lion heart and passionate style, came out for a skate of his own. We didn’t speak at first, perhaps because I was too thrilled and awed at age 16 to be on the same ice with a New York Ranger, the team for which I had always rooted and hopelessly aspired to play.
But it got better. Lou apparently needed to work on starting the Rangers' break-out play. He motioned me toward the boards at the defensive zone face-off circle. “When I come around the net, you break for the middle of the blue line,” he instructed me. I did, and with both of us in full stride, he laid a clearing pass on my stick. After we did this several times, Lou nodded at me and left the ice. I skated around in a worshipful daze until one of our coaches called me into the locker room.
Words cannot describe the televised horror of March 9, 1963 when I watched Lou, then a Montreal Canadien, slide headfirst into the end boards after a high-speed collision near his net. He departed on a stretcher, motionless, and never played again. I have since read that he eventually recovered from an immobilizing neck fracture.
It was 25 years until I met another NHL player -- several of them, actually -- at a cocktail reception for some New York Islanders. They seemed more like ordinary mortals, only younger – much younger. I thought, as my Princeton coach had often said of some formidable opponent, “They put on their pants the same way you do – one leg at a time.” Hard to believe that Lou Fontinato had suited up in similar fashion, but I suppose he did.
What sank in over the years was that a player at the top of his profession had put in extra work to improve his game and been willing to use whatever help was at hand, however inadequate. Should Lou or his heirs ever read this, I hope they’ll be amused to discover how he became a memorable part of a Hill education that was never advertised in the school catalog.
My Most Memorable Game
By Nate Yinger '05
One thing I learned while going through the Hill hockey archives is that we tend to be very streaky against Lawrenceville. We will dominate them for a few years, then they will dominate us, so on and so forth.
During my first two years as a Hill hockey player, they dominated us. We went three consecutive years without beating them, 2001-02 (which would have been my third form year had I attended Hill all four years), 2002-03, and 2003-04. The last year of that streak was tough.
We tied them on home ice then tied them a week later at the Albany Academy tournament. Toward the end of the year, we played at their barn with only two lines; all but two or three of our sixth formers were suspended for an off campus incident, and our captain, Jeff Beck, almost couldn’t play in the game because he had the flu. The only reason he played was because his mom picked him up from the health center that morning and said she was taking him home; in reality, she was taking him to our game at L-Ville. Despite being severely outmanned, we took them to overtime tied at 3, thanks in large part to an outstanding performance in net by Kelly Curl. Early in OT, we were whistled for a penalty; after we killed it off, it looked like we were destined for another tie. Wrong. With 15 seconds left, they scored to win it 4-3. Talk about a heartbreaking loss. We didn’t forget that game.
We had high expectations the next year. A strong sixth form class was supported by some very good returning underclassmen and a handful of good new recruits. The team opened the regular season on a Saturday night with a big 7-3 win against a good South Kent team in front of a huge crowd at E.T. Hall rink. Our second game, a Wednesday night home contest against Lawrenceville, snapped the winless streak as we skated to a 4-1 win. While beating L-Ville is always memorable, that wasn’t the most memorable L-Ville game that year.
We caught fire after Christmas, winning 12 of our final 15 games. In early February, with our game at L-Ville looming in the horizon, a couple of guys on the team got the idea to propose sending a fan bus to the game to support us. The idea was approved, and seats on the bus filled instantly.
The coaches made sure we went about business as normal that day even though we knew we had a bus full of fans coming. We got to the rink, dropped our gear off in the locker room, and changed to go into their fieldhouse to jog, stretch, and finish off our pre-game routine with the traditional “VisionQuest” run, which I can’t really explain but hope is still done. Lawrenceville’s rink connects to the upper level of their fieldhouse, which overlooks the indoor track. The instant we entered the fieldhouse from the rink and began our jog, a huge roar went up from below; the indoor track team was there for a meet that day. Seconds later, their team entered the opposite side of the fieldhouse for their warm-up. The stage was set.
Toward the end of warm-ups, the fan bus arrived. Fifty kids carrying hockey sticks, drums, horns, and anything else they could use to make noise stormed into the arena and instantly made their presence known. Despite the adrenaline pump provided by the visiting fans, Lawrenceville found themselves up 1-0 with time winding down in the first period, and the Hill faithful were getting antsy. Late in the period our second scoring line connected to tie the game, which brought everyone back to life. At this point in time, people on the indoor track team who were finished competing made their way to the rink to join the fans who came on the bus. The arena was packed; half of the fans were supporting us, the visiting team, and were much louder than the home crowd.
The second period was a huge period for Hill, as we scored three goals in fairly quick succession around an L-Ville goal to take a 4-2 lead into the locker room. Post-grad Andrew Buchanan scored the third goal, which was followed with a score by fourth former Jake Kratz, who streaked down the right wing and snapped a shot far-post past the L-Ville goalie, which effectively ended the sieve’s afternoon. They were on their heels.
Lawrenceville scored early in the third to cut the lead to one, but we weren’t about to let them tie it up and send the game to into overtime in their place for the second consecutive year. The rest of the period was back and forth, with each team getting scoring chances, but no goals. As the final minute approached, a desperate L-Ville team pulled their goalie. With about 45 seconds left, the line that opened the scoring for Hill closed the scoring with an empty netter to make the score 5-3. While a two-goal comeback in 45 seconds is possible, it is highly unlikely, and our fans knew it. From the time the puck dropped following the empty netter until the final buzzer sounded, a loud chant rang out from our half of the stands: “THIS IS OUR HOUSE!!!!!” As soon as the game ended, our fans poured out of the stands and rushed over to where we would come off the ice to mob us. It was over; we had completed the season sweep of the Larries, and the most memorable game of my Hill hockey career was complete.
Remembering Ned Hall
Ned Hall and some of his hockey players on the old rink
[remarks by Austin Hoyt at the groundbreaking for the new Edward Tuck Hall hockey rink]
I am indebted to Neil Ulman Class of ‘56 for many of these recollections of Ned Hall as well as the writing. (His gray matter seems to be disintegrating at a somewhat slower rate than mine.) Neil and I were both here at the creation – new boys in Sept. 1952, just weeks after Ned Hall arrived as a new headmaster.
My cab pulled up in front of the Headmaster’s House, and I was barely out the door when this gentleman came up to me, shook my hand and said, “You must be Mr. Hoyt.” Ned had memorized the names of 110 new boys from the pictures we had submitted. I was amazed. What he said next is still hard to believe.
In the taxi from the Reading Airport, I had thought to myself, “How could I have allowed myself to be shuffled off to a school that didn’t play hockey?” I had spent five years at Nichols in Buffalo, the first school in the country to have an artificial ice indoor rink. And now what was I supposed to do? Play basketball? That was unthinkable. Wait for the Dell to freeze?
What Ned said to me next was this. “We are going to play hockey.”
He meant business. When he left St. Marks where he had been assistant head master, Ned told the head master and hockey coach, Bill Barber, “I will see you at Madison Square Garden in two years.”
It soon became clear Ned intended to build a rink. At a time when the Hill had arguably the best wrestling team and coach in the country and did not have a proper wrestling room, to make a rink a priority showed a lot of chutzpah.
That winter, anyone who could skate or was interested in learning piled into a bus headed for the old Philadelphia Arena at 45th & Market, a dingy building with peeling paint that smelled of stale cigars. It was the first time many of us had skated in a real rink with sideboards and lines on the ice or worn real hockey pads.
Ned ran us through some drills, assigned us to lines and defense pairs and conducted a brief scrimmage. We had only ten such practice sessions to prepare for six games. Ned and faculty assistants Alex Revell, Cliff Little, Ken Jackman, and George Whiteley would drive us to the Allentown- Bethlehem rink, Baker Rink at Princeton, back to Philadelphia. I have a suspicion that Ned bankrolled the ice-time.
Most of the time we did not have ice, and Ned organized a game on the grass near the track to teach us position play. The Hill News called the game Gillball and described it as a combination of basketball, football, soccer and hockey. No wonder that none of Ned’s first three captains, John Clarke, Dave Kenny or I can remember exactly how it was played.
Gill-ball wasn’t the only improvisation. We stood in sneakers on a pair of linoleum-covered platforms, which Ned had installed on a tennis backboard court near the Upper School, and shot pucks at our goalies, Ted Ames and Gerry Cantini. Hall knew the drill. He had been a goalie at St. Marks, and in his senior year when ice was scarce, the team shot pucks at him in the baseball cage. His 1937 year book had this to say: “The patience of the squad - and above all the faithful work of Goalie Hall - deserve commendation; for a heated dusty cage is a poor substitute for the bracing airs of rink work.”
Ned played five games that year and allowed nine goals. His final game, which St. Marks lost to the Princeton freshmen 2 to 0, was cut short by three minutes after the ninth player fell through the ice.
No wonder he was so eager to build a proper rink.
Our first game in 1953 was an 8-0 loss to Peddie. Ned was angry. He didn’t think some of us had tried hard enough, and we got a real tongue-lashing. That was our first exposure to the intensity with which he approached the game.
In mid-season Capt. John Clarke’s goal pulled out a 5-4 overtime win against Morristown (NJ) High School.
On our road trips the song on the radio always seemed to be “How Much is that Doggie in the Window?” I guess that dates us! On the bus to Lawrenceville, we sang along enthusiastically. What else are you supposed to do before you get crucified? Lawrenceville pummeled us 10 to nothing. We rode home in silence.
The next fall the team helped build the rink. At least we dumped sand from wheelbarrows between the pipes and raked it around. Coach Hall was out there in his baseball cap supervising. He loved it.
After Christmas 1953 I took a sleeping car on the 20th Century Limited from Buffalo to Grand Central for our rendezvous with St. Marks in the Garden. The Garden was hot and smoky. It made me gag, but Hall must have felt at home. He used to smoke his pipe behind the bench, and as the action got more intense, his eyes would bulge and the smoke would billow.
We lost 5 to 3. But that winter we turned the tables twice on Peddie, 12-1 and 10-1 and beat Lawrenceville 4-3.
My senior year we beat St. Marks 2 to 1. What a kick it must have been for Ned to have kept his pledge to meet his old school’s coach and Headmaster in the Garden and then - on the second try - to win.
Hall had never been a great hockey player. He made the Yale freshman squad – not the team – and for the next three years played for Timothy Dwight College in the intramural league. He was well aware of his own limitations. In his Yale 25th reunion book, he wrote that he was coaching at The Hill “despite what his classmates will remember as weak ankles and myopia.”
Ned was an OK goalie. Sometimes he would put on the pads, get in the net and flail around as we bombarded him. He warded off our shots commendably.
Goalies aren’t supposed to be great skaters, passers or stick handlers and Ned had a hard time demonstrating these skills - although he had studied the techniques well enough to pass along some basics. Once, disgusted with our lack of aggression, he undertook to show us how to check and strip the puck from an opponent. The player cast in the opponent’s role neatly stepped aside as Ned charged - and crashed into the boards. There was the coach in a heap on the ice! It took all the restraint we could muster to stifle our laughter. But his basic point did not escape us. Intensity mattered. If you wanted to play the game for Ned Hall, you played your hardest. Hall demanded hard play - and fair play. Jim Fox, a big defenseman who became football captain, found these hard to reconcile. Jim remembers that when a forward was bearing down on him, he wanted to do him in. His instinctive model of play was what we all came to know as the NHL at its roughest. Hall would have none of it. Fox recalls Ned taking him aside after practice and explaining that the purpose of the game was not to leave opponents in a heap, it was to take the puck away and help set up a play so we could score.
“He would explain in a quiet compassionate way,” Jim remembers, “that we can’t continue to play this way and win. He had the patience of Job.”
Ned’s patience had its limits. Once after Fox had been penalized for a crushing board check, Ned benched him for the rest of the period, even though he was our best defenseman and the game was close. Ned was furious not because the penalty put the team a man down. He was furious because he thought Jim wasn’t playing by the rules. Jim remembers this incident charitably - as the act of someone who cared about the game, who cared about fair play, who cared about his players.
I think all of us who played for Ned felt that he had high standards for the game and us as individuals. He had a way of making us feel important, a way of making us feel he cared about us. That brought the best out of us.
Ned also had high standards for himself. He was a coach eager to learn. Neil Ulman remembers when he came back as a member of the Princeton freshman team, Ned cornered him after the game with a generous compliment on the Princeton victory. Then, Neil recalls, “He grilled me closely: What had I learned at college? What did I think had been missing from the coaching at The Hill? What should be added? He was a proud coach with the humility to ask how he could do better.”
We were not great teams in those early years. We never had the depth to compete with the really good teams - like Lawrenceville in 1953 or Northwood School from Lake Placid in 1955. Northwood beat us 12-1. I have since become friends with one of their players who scored 8 goals in that game and said it helped get him into Princeton.
But single-handedly in a few short years Ned Hall, with his characteristic intensity and enthusiasm, turned hockey at The Hill from no team into respectable teams. I think back on what Ned said to me in front of the Headmaster’s House when I got out of that cab in September 1952. Who would have guessed where it would lead - that simple declarative sentence – said with quiet determination. “We are going to play hockey.”
And so we did. And that is why we are here tonight.
Thank you Coach.
And thank you George Knapp for all you have done to make this next wonderful stage of Hill Hockey a reality.
Hill’s First Rink Dedication Speaker Was a Stanley Cup Winner
Myles Lane at Dartmouth
He was a racket-busting, spy-hunting, former federal prosecutor and the first American to play for a Stanley Cup champion. When Myles J. Lane delivered the featured address fifty-two years ago to dedicate The Hill’s first hockey rink there were no Americans in the National Hockey League. Neither he nor his audience could have imagined the advent of women’s ice hockey. Yet his remarks were prophetic.
"There are not enough hockey rinks," Mr. Lane told the crowd gathered to watch a fledgling Hill squad take on Storm King School. "However, if the schools of this country continue to build rinks such as the one dedicated here today, it will be a great advancement (for) the hockey ambition of American boys."
A standout athlete at Melrose High School near Boston, Mr. Lane knew whereof he spoke. His career at Dartmouth, class of ’28, won him all-American football honors and election to both the college football and U.S. hockey halls of fame. He led the nation in scoring in 1927 – in football. His Dartmouth hockey records for most goals by a defenseman in a game (5), season (20) and career (50) still stand.
After graduation Mr. Lane joined the New York Rangers. The rookie became the subject of a famous hockey quip when he was improbably offered in trade for the Bruins all-time great Eddie Shore. Boston general manager Art Ross telegraphed back: "You are so many Myles from Shore you need a life preserver." The Bruins nevertheless soon bought Mr. Lane’s contract for $7,500, and he played on their 1929 Stanley Cup winning team.
With his earnings from professional hockey and some college football coaching, Mr. Lane attended Boston College Law School. When his New York legal and prosecutorial career was interrupted by World War II, he rose to the rank of commander in the U.S. Navy. After the war he investigated and prosecuted communist spies and Mafia racketeers in several high-profile cases. In 1951 he was appointed U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. He was elected to the New York State Supreme Court in 1968, then appointed to the Appellate Division in 1974.
Myles Lane’s February 13, 1954 prophecy for the impact of prep school rinks on American hockey set the scene for a 4-1 Hill victory over Storm King. One of the skaters became the first Hill alumnus to play college varsity hockey. Since then, other alumni have captained college teams and played in the NHL. Mr. Lane died in New York in August 1987 at the age of 84.
Sources:
Dartmouth College Sports Information
New York TIMES archives
MCI LegendsofHockey.net
TSN.ca (Canadian Sports website)
Old Skates
Five days ago I entered the basement in my 100-year-old house in Columbus, Ohio in search of my old skates. I'd recently committed to a trip to Pottstown to play in The Hill School Alumni Hockey Game, and with 10 days to go it was time to get ready. The storage area where the blades had been hanging last time I remembered smelled of everything I used to do: leather Bauer skates, old and obsolete leather gloves, a disgusting pair of shin guards and a lot of musty hunting and fishing gear. When I opened the door, the smell of rotting equipment mirrored how I felt about exposing to all who would watch in horror how little was left in my 54-year-old body for playing ice hockey again.
There they were. The laces had a kind of mold on them I had never seen before. Cobwebs covered both skates and I choked on the dust as I cleared a path to where they hung in the corner. I'd been afraid of this. They were in worse shape than I.
The shin guards and old forearm style gloves were a total loss as well. The next morning I could see them on the top of the garbage can on the street along with my skates where my son had unceremoniously dumped them. If I had done the chore myself, I would have placed them deep inside where people in passing cars wouldn't take note of the sorry state of the equipment that had served me so well 30 years before.
I should begin with a skate. Rent everything, I thought.
By noon I was on my way to the old OSU rink a couple of miles away. There was a public skating hour that I figured would be a good place to start. All morning, I had been stretching the hamstrings, the Achilles tendons and any other muscles I could remember that were associated with skating. In fact I had thrown in a few sit-ups and push-ups on the bathroom mat for good measure. The push-ups were a bad idea. Whenever I raised my chest from the tile, my left shoulder made a painful clicking noise. I remembered where it came from; some winger from the Princeton freshman team hooking my feet at the end of an icing call 35 years ago. I had been going full speed and then I was flying collarbone first into the boards.
At the service counter at the rink a young college boy raised his eyebrows when I asked for size 11s.
"We have a couple of them. They're not in too good a shape though:"
"Neither am I," I replied.
Sitting on a bench in the change, I took off my running shoes and placed them under me along with a rolled up sweatshirt. The odor of the rubber matting that covered the floor and the distinct smell of hockey team sweat reminded me of the hundreds of times I had laced up like this, It felt good to feel my knees above my waist as I sat there ready to go. A beautiful college girl, a figure skater; with her dark hair in a ponytail, glanced at me. There was pity in her eyes. How could she know I wasn't ready for this?
As I walked to the doorway leading to the arena, I suddenly felt too tall. At this age I wanted a much lower center of gravity. My height had been an advantage for me back when I played hockey in school: a longer reach, more leverage on forwards in front of the net. Now, standing up straight, I imagined myself a teetering giant with a long, hard way to fall if I caught an edge on the ice. Could I still remember how to swing from forwards to skating backwards without crashing? Could I manage any of my old moves carrying this extra thirty pounds of maturity around my waist? When I lifted my left skate to push off onto the shiny new surface, I did something instinctive, something I had learned the hard way. I checked to make sure I had taken the narrow strip of white tape off the sharpened blades. During my playing years at The Hill and Yale, our equipment managers had always put the tape on after sharpening for road trips. I forgot to take it off once. I remembered my teammates' amusement as I tumbled to the ice. I wasn’t going to let that happen again.
Of course there wasn't any tape on the blades. This was public-skating, not an away game.
Finally on the ice, I took a couple of laps very slowly, carefully lifting one leg over the other in the turns. The figure skater practiced in the center face-off circle, gracefully doing figure eights powered by effortlessly strong backward curls.
Leaning forward to balance myself, I began to accelerate, straightening my legs more with each stride. My rhythm was OK, but my feet felt desperately unsteady inside the stiff rental skates. Immediately my lower back began to ache, then the arches of the feet. I felt empathy for the beginners who were struggling around the rink with their arms straight out like tightrope walkers.
After a few minutes, my feet were on fire, as if hot needles had been thrust under the skin, Nonetheless my ankles were starting to remember how to hold an edge, my legs how to push away from my body one after the other. I began to enjoy the cool breeze in my face.
Then I felt the growing exhilaration that is skating itself. It's the feeling of flight, I thought. No. It's more like being on the ocean with a full sail pushing you out to sea. I'd completely forgotten how it felt to easily move faster and faster and faster under my own power on skates.
Over the loudspeaker they were playing a medley of Motown songs: The Supremes, The Four Tops, and then Marvin Gaye's I Heard It Through The Grapevine. I figured it was time to try a full stop at a decent speed, and of course, the dangerous switch to skating backwards at full stride. Take a rest first. I said to myself. Be smart. Do more stretches.
Along the boards on the far side of the rink were the team benches. I swung open one of the doors and perched myself there to recover for awhile. All around me were banners and huge posters featuring the stars of the Ohio State Women's Team who played their home games at the small arena. I'd been to a few of their games. They played darn good hockey, chippy in fact, and were a force in the WCHA every year. I felt no shame letting the blood return to my thighs and calve muscles while sitting on their bench. In a few minutes, I was ready to try skating like a hockey player again.
The place had slowly gotten more crowded without my noticing. As I stood up a back spasm attacked my lower lumbar. I bent over from the waist until it was gone. Across the rink from me a man tinkered with the hose on one of two new Zamboni machines.
As I continued to stretch out my back, I closed my eyes. I imagined the moves I would be attempting when I returned to the ice. I saw myself with all my equipment on: helmet, shoulder pads, breezers, socks and garters, and shin guards in place with miles of white tape. I can hear an arena filled with screaming fans and friends. It's a close game. I'm in the penalty box and my time is about to expire. The opposing center man is swinging across the middle of the ice in his end, about to take a pass on a breakout. My man to cover.
The young figure skater stopped sharply in front of me as I stepped out onto the ice again
"Are you all right, sir?"
"Everything hurts:" I stuttered.
"Did you play hockey?"
"I did. I'm trying to get ready for an alumni game. It's my first time on skates in over 20 years."
"Welcome back and good luck" She darted off as fast she had arrived.
I remembered what my wife, Sally, had told me the night before. She said it was ridiculous for me to play a hockey game at my age, that she'd been hearing about my physical maladies from aging every day, and that I'd been torturing her with complaints for several years. Now I was going to play the roughest game in the world after only a few days of skating? Be very careful, honey. I don't want to take care of you and your broken bones for the rest of the year.
My legs felt good from my few minutes off the ice. I began with a short burst along the boards and then turned into the corner with a couple of long strides. Picking up speed as I leaned close to the ice, I grew more confident. Now for a full stop.
Perfect. A mist of snow flew into the air. It felt wonderful. I stood there admiring the crispness of the move. When I began to skate away, my legs were as dead as an old tree stump. I couldn't have gotten away from a pee wee fore checker if I had to. I rested at center ice for a few seconds.
After a couple of laps of slow and steady skating, the pains subsided.
Now was the time to try the forwards to backwards full speed transition. This was the most basic move in hockey for a defenseman. If you could do it well, and skate backwards almost as fast as forwards, you could play the blue line. I remembered the million times I had done it in practice and games. I'd been the best at it.
As I picked up speed, I looked for the spot to try it. It was important to avoid crashing into the others as they weaved in and out of the traffic pattern. Two more times around and I still couldn't find an opening.
Suddenly the opportunity was there.
I don't exactly recall where I went wrong, but I think I didn't drag my back foot for that instant you have to for starting the spin around. Whatever it was, the next thing I knew a small group of children, their parents and the young figure skater were leaning over me asking if I was all right. Flat on my back, I apologized for scaring the daylights out of them.
I got up slowly, one knee at a time, wishing I had an old hockey stick to use as a crutch. I pushed off to try again, brushing the white snow from my sweatpants.
The next effort was flawless, I had been right. On skates, you have to un-weight yourself, for an instant, to switch from forward to backward and back again.
On the drive back to my house, with the car windows wide open to the cold, grey day, I remembered what must have been a hundred actual games I played in. I saw the faces of just as many teammates; guys with whom I shared the exhilaration of unexpected victory and the disappointment of battles narrowly lost. I realized how much I missed them.
Back home, I told Sally how great it went. I told her all about the feelings the experience had brought back.
Then I spent over two hours in my bath tub repeatedly opening the faucet for hotter and hotter water.
And that night I had my best sleep in years.
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