soopahviv.net/blog

Muse back!

April 17, 2005 / Sunday

Thunder Thighs!

Back from a weekend of hockey up in Canada (eh?). Ingrid and Liz assembled a bunch of mostly Maroon skaters for what turned out to be a fairly fun tournament. 3 games in under 18 hours! Yeah, 3 not 5. I'm disappointed, but not unhappy with how we played.

We had a shaky start, losing game 1 0-5 on Friday night. Even though most of us knew each other prior to this weekend, only some of us had played together before. We didn't get completely outplayed, but we were out of sorts enough times that they scored several open backdoor goals.

We redid some of the lines after that game. I dropped from wing back to D so Liz could come up and center my line. We also did a forward for D swap with another of our lines. That made a huge difference. We still lost our Saturday morning game, 1-3, but hey, we scored! Despite the loss, things felt much better. We decided to keep the new lines for our afternoon game.

Game 3 started off great. We scored first and early. Unfortunately, the other team followed that up with 3 goals of their own. We got one more (mine! :), they got one more, and we finished the game 2-4. Siiigh, another loss. But, that felt better than game 2. Can't complain too much there.

I was super happy about my goal. I scored from D! It was the first time I've ever gone around someone on my backhand side, and the first time I've ever thought about what shot to use and then actually used it successfully. Sometime in the third period, I got the puck at our blue line, looked up, and saw that both teams were going for massive line changes. I saw the puck, Liz, two defenders, and their goal(ie). Ooh! Open ice! I pushed the puck forward, skated with it, went around defender number one at their blue line, pulling the puck away from the poke check to my backhand side (!), swung back toward my forehand to avoid the second defender, shot low, saw the goalie butterfly and block my shot with a leg pad, and watched the puck bounce out to the side a few feet. In the few steps between where I shot the puck and where it rebounded out, I looked at the goalie, still down, saw the opening above the leg pad, asked myself what my highest percentage shot was to get the puck above that leg pad, decided I should take a snapshot, and, holy crap, I actually did it. The next thing I knew, I was watching the puck hit the back of the net.

A planned and executed shot? Wow. I'm still shocked.

But alas, an 0-3 record did not earn us a berth to the playoffs. Nonetheless, it was great to finally get to skate with some folks that I'd only ever skated against. Along those same lines, it was also great to get to hang out with them off the ice.

On the upside, our failure to reach the playoffs turned Sunday into shopping day. Good thing we were in Canada, land of lots and lots of hockey gear. I bought myself a new trapper, and, more importantly, a goalie jill. The jill was a good buy 'cause it's nearly impossible to find one in California. The trapper I probably paid more for than I would have online, but you can't beat being able to try on 20 trappers under one roof, and heck, that's probably the hardest-to-fit piece of gear for me in net. I suspect I'll get to try it out next weekend. Until then, it's tied up for break in.

As for the title of this post ...

Our team was named Belmont Thunder. That was our cheer.

It's a lot more fun when you can laugh at yourselves. ;-)

April 17, 2005 11:28 PM | Hockey

Comments

Posted by: Liz at April 18, 2005 01:18 AM

Posted by: Viv at April 18, 2005 01:20 AM

Posted by: cheddah j at April 18, 2005 10:10 AM

Posted by: Viv at April 18, 2005 10:13 AM