We sealed it just after 3 o’clock Sunday afternoon. None of us expected it. Everybody figured we would be on the outside looking in. But it was just the opposite. We prevailed over all the opposition and when we gathered for a victory photograph, somebody put it facetiously, but appropriately.
“We are the champions,” one of my teammates said.
“Miracle on ice, if you ask me,” I said.
It happened for the Americans in Lake Placid, N.Y., at the 1980 Winter Olympics, where they won the men’s hockey gold medal, the so-called “Miracle on Ice.” There was Team Canada’s win over the Soviets at the end of the Summit Series in 1972. And, of course, there was “the golden goal” Sidney Crosby scored in sudden-death overtime against the Americans at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. But, most people missed that latest hockey miracle I mentioned, the one at my local arena last Sunday afternoon.
It was the finale to the 2012-1013 season of Uxbridge Adult Hockey (UAH). For nearly eight months, men and women from around the township have filled their Tuesday and Sunday nights with recreational hockey. On the men’s side (Sunday nights) there are two divisions – Under-40 and Over-40 – competing for, well, bragging rights for that evening only. Since all teams make it into the playoffs, any competitive intensity to the game really only occurs during the final few weeks of the season. And it came down to the quarter-finals and semi-finals and finals last weekend.
“We just snuck in,” said our team rep Tommy Redford last Friday night.
Our team – the Gold Team – just managed to make it into the top four and was therefore a long shot to get to the final. Not only that, but we were minus a good defenceman and a strong forward, the latter having landed a pass to watch the Masters Tournament in Augusta, Georgia.
Then, in spite of all that we began to win. First we won the final game of the round-robin playoffs Friday night. Then we won Saturday afternoon against the team everybody expected to take all the marbles, as did the team we had beaten on Friday night. That put two unlikely combatants – the Grey Team and mine, the Gold Team, into the final on Sunday afternoon.
A note: Remember that recreational hockey was never created for winning or losing. “Oldtimers,” as it’s generally known, officially began back in the mid-1970s, when a couple of diehard hockey players craved a bit of the fun they’d always experienced as kids on the frozen ponds and local outdoor rinks. Gerry Aherne and John Gouett scraped together enough like-minded, nearly middle-aged hockey players from coast to coast to stage the first ever Canadian Oldtimers’ Hockey Association tournament in Peterborough, Ont., in 1977.
No slap shots. No body-checking. Few, if any, spectators. Just a bunch of games of shinny on a winter weekend in 1977. Well, the idea caught on so well that in the years that followed all over the country rec hockey was played (and continues to be played) because adults love skating, stick-handling, passing, shooting and stopping pucks in a semi-competitive atmosphere.
“It’s never serious hockey,” we always say, “because everybody’s got to get up and go to work in the morning.”
Rec hockey has always been about the fun, not the winning. However, this past weekend, you might have been hard pressed to tell. When it became apparent that my team, the Gold Team, had made it into the final final against the Grey Team, we began to look around the dressing room and think maybe we had a shot at it.
Oh yeah, and you know that teammate who went off to the Masters? He actually came back in time to join us in the final. We all decided we would just go out into that last game of the season with a bit of nervousness in our stride, a smile on our faces, and a bit of a question in the back of our minds: “What the heck are we doing here?”
Then, the oddest thing happened. We scored first. Then, reality set in as the Grey Team answered. But then we scored again, and again, and again. Then, it was down to the last few minutes and it looked like a solid lead. It was a solid. The buzzer sounded. We had won. It was another “miracle on ice,” a bunch of “golden goals” for the Gold Team.
So, if you notice 14 guys around town over the next few days showing off (rather obviously) their tidy, new sweatshirts with “UAH 2012-2013 Champions” emblazoned across the chest, just let them enjoy the afterglow of winning the Men’s Over-40 final.
Oh, and if you really want to humour them, you could greet them by name: Mark the goalie, defencemen Mike P., Ed, Olaf and Jim, centremen Ray, Mike T. and Tim, and wingers Grant and Ranald, Tom and Roy, and Dean and Ted. They’re pretty pumped.