Hockey Life Quotes

Because sometimes in life Ken doesn't always choose Barbie.

I was flipping channels, watching this cheerleading program on MTV. They took a field hockey girl and “transformed” her into a cheerleader by the end of the show. I was just wondering: what if she liked field hockey better?

There are no environments where you're only going to win, because life just isn't like that.

I love you, and I want to be with you because you make my life better.” He pushed her hair behind her ear. “You asked me once what I see when I look into my future.” He slid his palm down her shoulder and took her hand. “I see you,” he said and kissed her knuckles.

Hockey is a game. You’re my life.

I had lost my reason for getting sober in the first place.” Her brows furrow. “What? Money? Hockey? The will to live a normal life?” “You, Lana. I lost you.

Chelsea, I knew when you showed up on my porch that you were going to be trouble. You were bossy and annoying and you brought sunshine into a very dark time in my life. You saved me when I didn’t even know I needed saving. I love you for that. I will always love you for that.” He raised her hand to his lips and kissed the backs of her knuckles. “Please say you’ll stay in my life and make trouble with me forever.” -Mark Bressler

Because sometimes in life, Ken didn't always choose Barbie. (Jane Alcott)

GOD DOESN’T HATE FAGS OR ANYBODY ELSE FOR THAT MATTER. GOD SAVES! THEN, GOD PASSES IT TO GRETZKY - WHO ROOFS THAT SHIT, TOP-SHELF! THEN GOD AND GRETZKY HIGH FIVE & BELLY-BUMP, CELEBRATING THEIR HOCKEY PROWESS. AND NEVER ONCE DO THEY GIVE A SHIT IF ANYBODY’S GAY OR NOT.

Life should be more like hockey. When someone pisses you off, you just beat the shit out of them, then sit in the penalty box for five minutes. ~ Sandman

Home was his favorite place too. But home for him was anywhere Jane happened to be. Never in his life had he loved someone as much as he loved her. So much that it scared him sometimes. He pulled her against him and looked out over the city. He was in love with his wife. Yeah, he knew what that said about him. That he was a goner. Leg-shackled for life. Whipped by a short woman with a big attitude. Yep, that's what it said about him, and he didn't care.

David drives back to Björnstad. Sits in the car and cries in anger. He is ashamed. He is disgusted. With himself. For an entire hockey life he has trained a boy, loved him like a son, been loved back as a father. There is no player as loyal as Benji. No bigger heart than his. How many times has David hugged number sixteen after a game and told him that? "You are the bravest bastard I know, Benji." The bravest bastard I know. " And after all those hours in locker rooms, all those nights in the bus, all the conversations and blood, sweat and tears, the boy didn't dare tell his coach his greatest secret. It's a betrayal, David knows it's a terrible betrayal. There is no other way to explain how much a grown man must have failed for such a warrior of a boy to make him think his coach would be less proud of him if he was gay. David hates himself for not being better than his father. For that is a son's job.

I am for hockey. I find I should like to hit something with a stick. -Gemma Doyle Trilogy

Because the world would be empty without you,” he said. “Because we wouldn’t have met, and my soul would be lost for the rest of my life, searching for yours.

Canadian winters are long. Life is hard and so is ice.

There weren't any time-outs, though. Not in life, and not in hockey.

Are you ready for this thing called life? 'Cause I can't do it without you.

To every single person who lives their life with love, respect, and compassion for all. We can change the world. Together. #BeKindLoveHard

I love everything about you Kacey, because the best thing in life is finding someone who knows your flaws, mistakes, difficulties, and still think you are bad-ass and loves you.

On the first day of November last year, sacred to many religious calendars but especially the Celtic, I went for a walk among bare oaks and birch. Nothing much was going on. Scarlet sumac had passed and the bees were dead. The pond had slicked overnight into that shiny and deceptive glaze of delusion, first ice. It made me remember sakes and conjure a vision of myself skimming backward on one foot, the other extended; the arms become wings. Minnesota girls know that this is not a difficult maneuver if one's limber and practices even a little after school before the boys claim the rink for hockey. I think I can still do it - one thinks many foolish things when November's bright sun skips over the entrancing first freeze. A flock of sparrows reels through the air looking more like a flying net than seventy conscious birds, a black veil thrown on the wind. When one sparrow dodges, the whole net swerves, dips: one mind. Am I part of anything like that? Maybe not. The last few years of my life have been characterized by stripping away, one by one, loves and communities that sustain the soul. A young colleague, new to my English department, recently asked me who I hang around with at school. "Nobody," I had to say, feeling briefly ashamed. This solitude is one of the surprises of middle age, especially if one's youth has been rich in love and friendship and children. If you do your job right, children leave home; few communities can stand an individual's most pitiful, amateur truth telling. So the soul must stand in her own meager feathers and learn to fly - or simply take hopeful jumps into the wind. In the Christian calendar, November 1 is the Feast of All Saints, a day honoring not only those who are known and recognized as enlightened souls, but more especially the unknowns, saints who walk beside us unrecognized down the millennia. In Buddhism, we honor the bodhisattvas - saints - who refuse enlightenment and return willingly to the wheel of karma to help other beings. Similarly, in Judaism, anonymous holy men pray the world from its well-merited destruction. We never know who is walking beside us, who is our spiritual teacher. That one - who annoys you so - pretends for a day that he's the one, your personal Obi Wan Kenobi. The first of November is a splendid, subversive holiday. Imagine a hectic procession of revelers - the half-mad bag lady; a mumbling, scarred janitor whose ravaged face made the children turn away; the austere, unsmiling mother superior who seemed with great focus and clarity to do harm; a haunted music teacher, survivor of Auschwitz. I bring them before my mind's eye, these old firends of my soul, awakening to dance their day. Crazy saints; but who knows what was home in the heart? This is the feast of those who tried to take the path, so clumsily that no one knew or notice, the feast, indeed, of most of us. It's an ugly woods, I was saying to myself, padding along a trail where other walkers had broken ground before me. And then I found an extraordinary bouquet. Someone had bound an offering of dry seed pods, yew, lyme grass, red berries, and brown fern and laid it on the path: "nothing special," as Buddhists say, meaning "everything." Gathered to formality, each dry stalk proclaimed a slant, an attitude, infinite shades of neutral. All contemplative acts, silences, poems, honor the world this way. Brought together by the eye of love, a milkweed pod, a twig, allow us to see how things have been all along. A feast of being.

If there's a transferrable skill from hockey to real life, sweeping and mopping are it.

decide right in this moment, that if by some miracle I ever have children, I will hug them, and hug them often. What a simple, but life-changing gesture.

she’d packed up her mother’s life in boxes for storage

I’m trying to fix a problem I caused, not start more of them.” “Then fix what actually matters here, and spoiler warning, it’s not the vase.” “I…” I lose the rest of my sentence. “What was the point of going back to rehab if you were only going to start drinking again?” My heart feels like someone split it apart with the jaws of life. “I had lost my reason for getting sober in the first place.” Her brows furrow. “What? Money? Hockey? The will to live a normal life?” “You, Lana. I lost you.

But it’s the temptation of so many suburban-raised children to invent tales of adversity, to create hardscrabble mythologies out of life histories marked by little more than field hockey games and orthodontist appointments.

You want to be a hockey coach? Get used to not having the things other people have. Free time, a family life, decent coffee. Only the toughest of men can handle this sport. Men who can drink terrible coffee cold, if need be.

The little kids by the water threw their hands in the air and squealed, chasing each other in circles. It was hard to believe that I’d ever been that small. That young. That happy and clueless. They had pain ahead. Heartbreak. Loss. They didn’t know and I didn’t want them to – but at the same time, I hated that I hadn’t known. I’d taken everything for granted – my mother, my friends in Alexandria, playing hockey. I dreamed about the future because that’s what people persuade you to do when you’re a kid, but that’s the biggest lie of all – that you can plan. Reality is, you have no fucking clue what’s coming and neither do they

For the first time in his whole life, Laurent played the game out of love instead of hate. But it wasn’t his love of hockey that kept him focused in net. Every time a puck came toward him and he made a save, he thought, “This is for Isaac.” Every time one of his dickhead former teammates snarled something insulting or called him names, he ignored them and thought about Isaac calling him Saint. He thought about Isaac’s dumb blue hair dye that had left a stain in Laurent’s shower and that lip ring that drove Laurent crazy. He thought about the lake and eating a Twinkie on Isaac’s floor. He thought about Isaac saying he loved him.

Father had stretched out his long legs and was tilting back in his chair. Mother sat with her knees crossed, in blue slacks, smoking a Chesterfield. The dessert dishes were still on the table. My sisters were nowhere in evidence. It was a warm evening; the big dining-room windows gave onto blooming rhododendrons. Mother regarded me warmly. She gave me to understand that she was glad I had found what I had been looking for, but that she and father were happy to sit with their coffee, and would not be coming down. She did not say, but I understood at once, that they had their pursuits (coffee?) and I had mine. She did not say, but I began to understand then, that you do what you do out of your private passion for the thing itself. I had essentially been handed my own life. In subsequent years my parents would praise my drawings and poems, and supply me with books, art supplies, and sports equipment, and listen to my troubles and enthusiasms, and supervise my hours, and discuss and inform, but they would not get involved with my detective work, nor hear about my reading, nor inquire about my homework or term papers or exams, nor visit the salamanders I caught, nor listen to me play the piano, nor attend my field hockey games, nor fuss over my insect collection with me, or my poetry collection or stamp collection or rock collection. My days and nights were my own to plan and fill.

.. when she looked at Nate she saw a kid who’d been shoved into lockers during high school. And now he wanted the last laugh, taking every opportunity to throw his (nerdy) weight around. He’d bought a hockey team, and he was going to make the jocks do his bidding, at least until the day he realized that vindication wasn’t everything in life.

She played really well... for a girl Her stat lines are impressive... for a woman. Nobody tells a male hockey player that he played amazingly well for a man.

But, in all fairness, I’m pretty sure being told to eat yummy food and go to bed early is, in fact, one of my pre-existing kinks. It’s a life kink, if you will.

Who would’ve thought the love of my life would be the asshole who ran me down in the hallway a few months ago.

All thanks to Cam. He’s shown me it’s okay to be selfish once in a while. I’m allowed to be the main character in my own life.

I've believed in the Toronto Maple Leafs my entire life. The least you could do is believe in yourself.

Going through old papers I came across the transcript of a university debate on Rublyov. God, what a level. Abysmal, pathetic. But there is one remarkable contribution by a maths professor called Manin, Lenin Prize winner, who can hardly be more than thirty. I share his views. Not that one should say that about oneself. But it's exactly what I felt when I was making Andrey. And I'm grateful to Manin for that. "Almost every speaker has asked why they have to be made to suffer all through the three hours of the film. I'll try to reply to that question. It is because the twentieth century has seen the rise of a kind of emotional inflation. When we read in a newspaper that two million people have been butchered in Indonesia, it makes as much impression on us as an account of our hockey team winning a match. The same degree of impression! We fail to notice the monstrous discrpancy between these two events. The channels of our perception have been smoothed out to the point where we are no longer aware. However, I don't want to preach about this. It may be that without it life would be impossible. Only the point is that there are some artists who do make us feel the true measure of things. It is a burden which they carry throughout their lives, and we must be thankful to them.

Keys parachuted down into one of the exact seats he purchased that he and his father sat in as season ticket holders in the Old Barn on Grand River Avenue. Keys slipped his arm around the empty chair dressed with his father’s withering Tiger’s baseball cap, secured to the seat with a quarter inch drywall screw. Keys reflected upon his father, who chauffeured Keys and other players, every weekend, to a hockey tournament somewhere, “You know pop…every kid you gave a ride too game or practice, came to your funeral. When this hat falls away, no more screws, pop. I’m gonna branch out…make new friends. Soon as these gypsy moths get a hold of your precious, Old English “D”, here--turn your glory years, Kaline and Mclain into tree threads.

A scrawny little kid with hand-me-down gloves, a drunk for a father, and bruises everyone saw but nobody asked about. Hockey noticed him when no one else did. Changed his life with colossal force.

I do have a statement to make after all,” I said. “I agree with my kids one hundred and fifty percent. Good-bye, everyone. And before I forget, up yours—each and every one of you—with a hockey stick.

Now that the hockey season is underway, life is hectic as fuck. Practice is brutal, and our schedule is exhausting. Jamie’s my rock, though. He comes to all my home games, and when I drag my tired self home from the airport after an away game, he’s waiting there to rub my shoulders, or shove food down my throat, or screw me until I can’t see straight. Our apartment is my safe place, my haven. I can’t even believe I considered trying to make it through my rookie season without him. It’s easy to figure out where he got that nurturing gene from, because his mom has been fussing over me all day.

Chelsea, I knew when you showed up on my porch that you were going to be trouble. You were bossy and annoying and you brought sunshine into a very dark time in my life. You saved me when I didn’t even know I needed saving. I love you for that. I will always love you for that.” He raised her hand to his lips and kissed the backs of her knuckles. “Please say you’ll stay in my life and make trouble with me forever.

There are moments in life you desperately want to hold on to, wish you could freeze time and space, bottle it up and take it with you. Open and breathe it in whenever you need to remember what it felt like to be alive.

I think a hero is an ordinary individual who finds the strength to persevere and endure in spite of overwhelming obstacles. The fifteen-year-old boy who landed on his head while wrestling with his brother, leaving him paralyzed and barely able to swallow or speak. Travis Roy, paralyzed in the first eleven seconds of a hockey game in his freshman year at college. Harry Steifel, paralyzed from the chest down in a car accident at seventeen, completing his education and working on Wall Street at age thirty-two, but having missed so much of what life has to offer. These are the real heroes, and so are the many families and friends who have stood by them.

It takes the boy an hour to half crawl, half stagger to the locker room. It's empty. The heating has been switched off. His shoes have been shredded and his clothes are lying soaking wet on the floor of the shower. It's the best day of his life.

And when you got to the Trestle or the Vacant Lot or the Pond there would already be six hundred kids there. There were always six hundred kids everywhere except where two or more neighbourhoods met – at the Park, for instance – where the numbers would grow into the thousands. I once took part in an ice hockey game at the lagoon in Greenwood Park that involved four thousand kids, all slashing away violently with sticks, and went on for at least three quarters of an hour before anyone realized that we didn’t have a puck.

When dressing my son before his hockey games, I am always careful with the gear, with each legging, each strap and buckle... Not only are his slight legs swallowed by the wide pads, but his chest and arms are covered only by a tight shirt, accentuating the contrast. Next the puffy upper-body protector, insulated sleeves, and jersey overtop. The final step is the helmet. I start crying as I place it on his head, cinch down the chin cup, and close the cage over his face... I just put my seven-year-old son in a bomb suit and sent him on the Long Walk. p 183

It's only a hockey game. An ice rink packed with people, two locker rooms full of players, two teams facing each other. Two men in a basement. Why do we care about that sort of thing? Perhaps because it clarifies all of our most difficult questions. What makes us shout out loud with joy? What makes us cry? What are our happiest memories, our worst days, our deepest disappointments? Who did we stand alongside? What's a family? What's a team? How many times in life are we completely happy? How many chances do we get to love something that's almost pointless entirely unconditionally?

I realize… she's hugging me. An affectionate, comfortable feeling envelops me. This is the hug I’ve waited for all my life. Right here, with this girl. A hug that makes up for a lifetime of not being held, not being loved, not being enough. This is the hug to end all hugs. But I definitely want more hugs in the future, and only from this woman. I’m not sure I’ll ever get enough hugs after this. I decide right in this moment, that if by some miracle I ever have children, I will hug them, and hug them often. What a simple, but life-changing gesture. Kissing is great… epic… amazing. But hugs are severely underrated.

That voice that talks badly to you is a demon voice. This very patient and determined demon shows up in your bedroom one day and refuses to leave. You are six or twelve or fifteen and you look in the mirror and you hear a voice so awful and mean that it takes your breath away. It tells you that you are fat and ugly and you don’t deserve love. And the scary part is the demon is your own voice. But it doesn’t sound like you. It sounds like a strangled and seductive version of you. Think Darth Vader or an angry Lauren Bacall. The good news is there are ways to make it stop talking. The bad news is it never goes away. If you are lucky, you can live a life where the demon is generally forgotten, relegated to a back shelf in a closet next to your old field hockey equipment. You may even have days or years when you think the demon is gone. But it is not. It is sitting very quietly, waiting for you. This motherfucker is patient. It says, “Take your time.” It says, “Go fall in love and exercise and surround yourself with people who make you feel beautiful.” It says, “Don’t worry, I’ll wait.” And then one day, you go through a breakup or you can’t lose your baby weight or you look at your reflection in a soup spoon and that slimy bugger is back. It moves its sour mouth up to your ear and reminds you that you are fat and ugly and don’t deserve love. This demon is some Stephen King from-the-sewer devil-level shit.

Hockey is just a silly little game. We devote year after year after year to it without ever really hoping to get anything in return. We burn and bled and cry, fully aware that the most the sport can give us, in the very best scenario. is incomprehensibly meager and worthless: just a few isolated moments of transcendence. That’s all. But what the hell else is life made of?

But then she looks her husband in the eye and he looks the way he did the first time he walked into her parents’ restaurant more than twenty years ago, after losing a stupid hockey game that was the biggest of his life. She remembers everything she fell in love with: a boy looking for something, a good father, a decent man. So she tells the truth. Everything. All in one go.

Careful in what and how you are learning. Professors specialize in “teaching” knowledge – They do not specialize in organization and application of knowledge. This is often why modern education includes “job placement” for real-world understanding and immersion of what you learn. Listen, you can grow up in Saudi Arabia, or in Kenya, or Bolivia – and study every book available on-line about hockey. But that will NEVER, by itself, lead you to become an adept hockey player or Hockey Coach. Yet, this is exactly the kind of thing going on all across the Fitness Industry, with ‘weekend certifications’ and the like. Knowledge is more than information gathering– and knowledge is NOT power in and of itself. Knowledge and access to it, is merely the “potential for proper and expert application.

Look, no one wants to hear that maybe she’s the reason her mother flew the coop. But my advice to you is to put this behind you. File it away in the drawer that’s saved for all the other crap that isn’t fair, like how the Kardashians are famous and how good-looking people get served faster at restaurants and how a kid who can’t skate to save his life winds up on the varsity hockey team because his dad is the coach.

There's an old saying in Hed: "Tell a stranger you hate Beartown and you'll have a friend for life." The smallest child in Hed is quick to learn that it's important for Hed Hockey to do well, but that it's even more important that things go really badly for Beartown. Partly in jest, obviously. The stands are full of screamed threats about "hating" and "killing" each other, but of course they aren't serious. Until all of a sudden they are.

Other children might have made drawings for him to stick on his fridge, but Alicia isn’t keen on drawing, so the puck marks in the plaster of his wall have become much the same thing: small marks in time that say someone you love grew up here. It started with Sune teaching her how to play hockey but it went on with him teaching her everything else you need to know in life: tying shoelaces and chanting times tables and listening to Elvis Presley.

Two-year-old Christine Hanson and four-year-old Juliana McCourt would never visit Disneyland. Neither they nor David Gamboa-Brandhorst would know first days of school, first loves, or any other milestone, from triumph to heartbreak, of a full life. Andrea LeBlanc would never again travel the world with her gregarious, pacifist husband, Bob. Julie Sweeney wouldn’t bear children, grow old, and feel safe with her confident warrior husband, Brian. Delayed passengers wouldn’t hear recitals of Forrest Gump dialogue from Captain Victor Saracini. First Officer Michael Horrocks’s daughter wouldn’t rise from bed with the promise that her daddy loved her to the moon. Ace Bailey and Mark Bavis would never again share their gifts with young hockey players or with their own families. Retired nurse Touri Bolourchi, who’d fled Iran and the Ayatollah Khomeini, wouldn’t see her grandsons grow up as Americans.

Multiple blows to the head, whether in football, soccer, boxing, hockey, or other activity, can sometimes cause permanent brain damage accompanied by changes in personality, memory, and thinking. Chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, is the medical term for the damage caused by these repeated concussions. Standard MRIs cannot detect it, so a diagnosis of CTE usually cannot be made with certainty until after a person has died. Only on autopsy can a pathologist see the damaged brain tissue.

Hockey is a club that holds its members tightly, the bond forged by shared hardship and mutual passion, by every trip to the pond, where your feet hurt and your face is cold and you might get a stick in the ribs or a puck in the mouth, and you still can’t wait to get back out there because you are smitten with the sound of blades scraping against ice and pucks clacking off sticks, and with the game’s speed and ever-changing geometry. It has a way of becoming the center of your life even when you’re not on the ice.

A marriage is like a hockey season, darling, okay? Even the best team can’t be at their best in every game, but they’re good enough to win even when they play badly. A marriage is the same: you don’t measure it by the holiday where you drink wine before lunch and have great sex and your biggest problem is that the sand is too hot and the sun is shining too brightly on the screen when you want to play games on your phone. You measure it from everyday life, at home, at its lowest level, from how you talk to each other and solve problems.

But it was only a dog." Of course no one actually says that, but it feels to Sune as if all his neighbors are thinking it. Everyday life just carries on out in the street while he sits in a million pieces in his kitchen. When he collects the mail someone goes past and says "sorry for your loss," but that isn't what he wants them to feel sorry about. He wants them to feel sorry about his life, and the fact that he's going to have to see it out now without that ill-disciplined, unruly little monster. Without paws on the edge of the bed and bite marks on his wrists. How's that going to work? Who's going to eat all the liver pate in the fridge? He receives a few text messages and phone calls from the committee of the hockey club and a couple of coaches of the youth teams, all very sorry, but not as if it had been a person. They're sad that Sune is sad, of course, but they don't really understand his loss. Because of course it was only a dog. It's so hard to explain that it's more than an animal when you're that animal's human. Perhaps it takes more empathy than most people are capable of. Or more imagination.

Ilya opened Instagram and started typing a new private message to ShaneHollanderHockeyPlayer. Shane You are the best thing in my life. I love you. Always. Maybe from the first time I saw you. I am thinking only about you right now. A million memories. Thank you for those. Whatever happens, I am with you. Safe in your heart. I believe it. He did. Ilya only had vague ideas of the afterlife and any gods who may be waiting there, but he believed his soul would stay with Shane, however it could. He believed the people you loved stayed with you until it was your time to go. He often felt his mother with him, and he knew he’d do the same for Shane.

Regardless, his crankiness had hit a level not previously documented in the history of the universe. That was saying something, considering I’d grown up with three older sisters who all had periods at the same time. Because of them, most things—most people—didn’t bother me. I knew what it was like to be bullied, and Aiden never crossed the line into being unnecessarily mean. He was just a jackass sometimes. He was lucky I had a tiny, itty, bitty crush on him; otherwise, he would have gotten the shank years ago. Then again, just about everyone with eyes who happened to also like men, had some kind of a thing for Aiden Graves. When he raised his eyebrows and looked at me from beneath those curly black eyelashes, flashing me rich-brown eyes set deep into a face that I’d only seen smile in the presence of dogs, I swallowed and shook my head slowly as I gritted my teeth and took him in. The size of a small building, he should have had these big, uneven features that made him look like a caveman, but of course he didn’t. Apparently, he liked to defy every stereotype he’d ever been assigned in his life. He was smart, fast, coordinated, and—as far as I knew—had never seen a game of hockey. He had only said ‘eh’ in front of me twice, and he didn’t consume animal protein. The man didn’t eat bacon. He was the last person I would ever consider polite, and he never apologized. Ever. Basically, he was an anomaly; a Canadian football-playing, plant-based lifestyle—he didn’t like calling himself a vegan—anomaly that was strangely proportional all over and so handsome I might have thanked God for giving me eyes on a couple of occasions.

We probably all had the dream, back then, that one day our talent would take us to the big time, and there was nothing wrong with dreaming that dream. That’s what fuels every game of shinny or back-lot baseball in the world. Of course, as you move along in your hockey career, reality begins to set in for most people. The dream begins to slowly fade away with the understanding that you will probably never be playing under the bright lights. But that’s beside the point—that’s not what childhood games are about, anyway. The life lessons we learned about competing remained with us even into adulthood. The types of competitions you engage in as an adult might be different from those you participated in when you were a child, but the rules from childhood still apply. What you learn on the frozen bays and ball fields doesn’t become less relevant, no matter where you end up.

​Dr. Wallace shook her head and I swear her voice was slightly condescending."Mrs. Davis, Shannon is very ill. Although she has been discharged, she still needs to come to therapy for quite some time. Even though she won’t speak to me now, I’m hoping for some breakthroughs with Shannon. She needs you to attend these therapy sessions in order to make progress."  ​Rolling my eyes upwards, I replied with annoyance, "I have other things in my life, Doctor. I do have two children. Five and six. Boys. They have very busy schedules. Hockey and piano lessons and play dates. I'm not like Shannon with no responsibilities or a care in the world." I also have a live in nanny, but the doctor doesn’t need to know that, right?  ​"I understand. Boys are busy little creatures. I have four of them," she replied, no malice in her voice whatsoever.  ​"Oh," I replied curtly. Well, I'm sure her social calendar is not nearly as filled as yours, Kathryn.

Back in the twentieth century, American girls had used baseball terminology. “First base” referred to embracing and kissing; “second base” referred to groping and fondling and deep, or “French,” kissing, commonly known as “heavy petting”; “third base” referred to fellatio, usually known in polite conversation by the ambiguous term “oral sex”; and “home plate” meant conception-mode intercourse, known familiarly as “going all the way.” In the year 2000, in the era of hooking up, “first base” meant deep kissing (“tonsil hockey”), groping, and fondling; “second base” meant oral sex; “third base” meant going all the way; and “home plate” meant learning each other’s names. Getting to home plate was relatively rare, however. The typical Filofax entry in the year 2000 by a girl who had hooked up the night before would be: “Boy with black Wu-Tang T-shirt and cargo pants: O, A, 6.” Or “Stupid cock diesel”—slang for a boy who was muscular from lifting weights—“who kept saying, ‘This is a cool deal’: TTC, 3.” The letters referred to the sexual acts performed (e.g., TTC for “that thing with the cup”), and the Arabic number indicated the degree of satisfaction on a scale of 1 to 10. In the year 2000, girls used “score” as an active verb indicating sexual conquest, as in: “The whole thing was like very sketchy, but I scored that diesel who said he was gonna go home and caff up [drink coffee in order to stay awake and study] for the psych test.” In the twentieth century, only boys had used “score” in that fashion, as in: “I finally scored with Susan last night.” That girls were using such a locution points up one of the ironies of the relations between the sexes in the year 2000. The continuing vogue of feminism had made sexual life easier, even insouciant, for men. Women had been persuaded that they should be just as active as men when it came to sexual advances. Men were only too happy to accede to the new order, since it absolved them of all sense of responsibility

Our freedom was severely restricted by a series of anti-Jewish decrees: Jews were required to wear a yellow star; Jews were required to turn in their bicycles; Jews were forbidden to use street-cars; Jews were forbidden to ride in cars, even their own; Jews were required to do their shopping between 3:00 P.M. and 5:00 P.M.; Jews were required to frequent only Jewish-owned barbershops and beauty parlors; Jews were forbidden to be out on the streets between 8:00 P.M. and 6:00 A.M.; Jews were forbidden to attend theaters, movies or any other forms of entertainment; Jews were forbidden to use swimming pools, tennis courts, hockey fields or any other athletic fields; Jews were forbidden to go rowing; Jews were forbidden to take part in any athletic activity in public; Jews were forbidden to sit in their gardens or those of their friends after 8:00 P.M.; Jews were forbidden to visit Christians in their homes; Jews were required to attend Jewish schools, etc. You couldn’t do this and you couldn’t do that, but life went on.

I rest my elbows on my knees, watching Paco make a complete fool of himself. Paco takes a little white golf ball and places it on top of a rubber circle inserted into the fake grass. When he swings the golf club, I wince. The club misses the ball and connects with the fake grass instead. Paco swears. The guy next to Paco takes one look at him and moves to another section. Paco tries again. This time the club connects, but his ball only rolls along the grass in front of him. He keeps trying, but each time Paco swings, he makes a complete ass out of himself. Does he think he’s hitting a hockey puck? “You done?” I ask once he’s gone through half the basket. “Alex,” Paco says, leaning on the golf club like it’s a cane. “Do ya think I was meant to play golf?” Looking Paco straight in the eye, I answer, “No.” “I heard you talkin’ to Hector. I don’t think you were mean to deal, either.” “Is that why we’re here? You’re tryin’ to make a point?” “Hear me out,” Paco insists. “I’ve got the keys to the car in my pocket and I’m not goin’ nowhere until I finish hittin’ all of these bulls, so you might as well listen. I’m not smart like you. I don’t have choices in life, but you, you’re smart enough to go to college and be a doctor or computer geek or somethin’ like that. Just like I wasn’t meant to hit golf balls, you weren’t meant to deal drugs. Let me do the drop for you.” “No way, man. I appreciate you makin’ an ass out of yourself to prove a point, but I know what I need to do,” I tell him.

It is a painful irony that silent movies were driven out of existence just as they were reaching a kind of glorious summit of creativity and imagination, so that some of the best silent movies were also some of the last ones. Of no film was that more true than Wings, which opened on August 12 at the Criterion Theatre in New York, with a dedication to Charles Lindbergh. The film was the conception of John Monk Saunders, a bright young man from Minnesota who was also a Rhodes scholar, a gifted writer, a handsome philanderer, and a drinker, not necessarily in that order. In the early 1920s, Saunders met and became friends with the film producer Jesse Lasky and Lasky’s wife, Bessie. Saunders was an uncommonly charming fellow, and he persuaded Lasky to buy a half-finished novel he had written about aerial combat in the First World War. Fired with excitement, Lasky gave Saunders a record $39,000 for the idea and put him to work on a script. Had Lasky known that Saunders was sleeping with his wife, he might not have been quite so generous. Lasky’s choice for director was unexpected but inspired. William Wellman was thirty years old and had no experience of making big movies—and at $2 million Wings was the biggest movie Paramount had ever undertaken. At a time when top-rank directors like Ernst Lubitsch were paid $175,000 a picture, Wellman was given a salary of $250 a week. But he had one advantage over every other director in Hollywood: he was a World War I flying ace and intimately understood the beauty and enchantment of flight as well as the fearful mayhem of aerial combat. No other filmmaker has ever used technical proficiency to better advantage. Wellman had had a busy life already. Born into a well-to-do family in Brookline, Massachusetts, he had been a high school dropout, a professional ice hockey player, a volunteer in the French Foreign Legion, and a member of the celebrated Lafayette Escadrille flying squad. Both France and the United States had decorated him for gallantry. After the war he became friends with Douglas Fairbanks, who got him a job at the Goldwyn studios as an actor. Wellman hated acting and switched to directing. He became what was known as a contract director, churning out low-budget westerns and other B movies. Always temperamental, he was frequently fired from jobs, once for slapping an actress. He was a startling choice to be put in charge of such a challenging epic. To the astonishment of everyone, he now made one of the most intelligent, moving, and thrilling pictures ever made. Nothing was faked. Whatever the pilot saw in real life the audiences saw on the screen. When clouds or exploding dirigibles were seen outside airplane windows they were real objects filmed in real time. Wellman mounted cameras inside the cockpits looking out, so that the audiences had the sensation of sitting at the pilots’ shoulders, and outside the cockpit looking in, allowing close-up views of the pilots’ reactions. Richard Arlen and Buddy Rogers, the two male stars of the picture, had to be their own cameramen, activating cameras with a remote-control button.

Everyone will remember the chanting from the Hed fans’ standing area: “Queers! Sluts! Rapists!” A Lot of people will believe that that whole part of the stand was chanting, because it felt like it, and from a distance it’s hard to differentiate among people. So everyone in the standing area will be criticized, even though by no means all of them were chanting, because we’ll want scapegoats, and it’ll be easy for anyone wanting to moralize to say that “ culture isn’t just what we encourage but what we allow to happen.” But when everyone is shouting, it can be hard to hear the opposition, and once an avalanche of hate has started to roll, it can be hard to tell who is responsible for stopping it. So when a young woman in a red shirt bearing a picture of a bull on the front leaves her place in the standing area, no one notices at first. But the woman loves Hed Hockey as much as the people shouting, she’s supported the team all her life, this part of the rink belongs to her, too. Going to stand among the seated fans, the hot dog brigade she’s always mocked, is her silent protest. A man in a green shirt sitting a short distance away sees her and stands up. He goes to the cafeteria, buys two paper cups of coffee, then walks down and gives one of them to her. They stand there next to each other, one red, one green, and drink in silence. A cup of coffee is no big thing. But sometimes it actually is. Within a few minutes, more red shirts have walked out of the standing area. Soon the steps of the seated part of the rink are full. The chant of “Queers! Sluts! Rapists!” is still echoing loudly, but the people chanting are exposed now. So everyone can see that there aren’t as many of them as we think. There never are.

I know you’ve had some bad luck recently, but there’s this guy, he plays for New York, they’re looking at trading him—” “Buck, I don’t want to date another hockey player.” I set down my controller so I can shovel more of the sundae into my mouth, uncaring of the suffering that will follow this frozen dairy heaven. “Not all of us are dogs, Violet. Randall’s a great guy.” “His name is Randall. How awesome can he be?” Buck mows down a group of people playing road hockey. “He goes by Randy.” “Even better. His name is another word for horny. Sounds perfect for me.” I’m not sure if I should laugh or cry. It’s not Randall’s fault his parents named him in relation to horniness. I can’t even entertain the idea of dating anyone else right now. Besides, I could never get serious with a hockey player again, or a dude named Randy. I’d make thrusting motions every time I said his name. It’d be awkward. “Wait a minute. Didn’t Alex get suspended for kicking the shit out of some guy named Randy?” I’m almost positive this is the case. “That was Randolph Cockburn. This is Randy Balls.” “Are you serious?” What’s with these guys with terrible last names? “Yeah, why?” Buck, my perverted stepbrother, doesn’t connect the outlandishly pornographic last name with the first name. “Randy Balls?” I burst out laughing. “You want to set me up with a guy named Randy Balls? Can you even imagine what would happen if we got married? My last name would be Balls. Violet Balls!” “Huh.” He makes a scrunchy face. “That wouldn’t be so good, would it? ’Specially if you hyphenated. Hall-Balls.” I continue to laugh until I start crying, which turns into hysterical, desperate sobs. I don’t want to end up as Violet Balls. I wanted to be Violet Waters—it sounds so romantic—and Alex ruined it all. My life sucks Randy’s balls.

SCENE 24 “Tiens, Ti Jean, donne ce plat la a Shammy,” my father is saying to me, turning from the open storage room door with a white tin pan. “Here, Ti Jean, give this pan to Shammy.” My father is standing with a peculiar French Canadian bowleggedness half up from a crouch with the pan outheld, waiting for me to take it, anxious till I do so, almost saying with his big frowning amazed face “Well my little son what are we doing in the penigillar, this strange abode, this house of life without roof be-hung on a Friday evening with a tin pan in my hand in the gloom and you in your raincoats—” “II commence a tombez de la neige” someone is shouting in the background, coming in from the door (“Snow’s startin to fall”)—my father and I stand in that immobile instant communicating telepathic thought-paralysis, suspended in the void together, understanding something that’s always already happened, wondering where we were now, joint reveries in a dumb stun in the cellar of men and smoke … as profound as Hell … as red as Hell.—I take the pan; behind him, the clutter and tragedy of old cellars and storage with its dank message of despair–mops, dolorous mops, clattering tear-stricken pails, fancy sprawfs to suck soap suds from a glass, garden drip cans–rakes leaning on meaty rock–and piles of paper and official Club equipments– It now occurs to me my father spent most of his time when I was 13 the winter of 1936, thinking about a hundred details to be done in the Club alone not to mention home and business shop–the energy of our fathers, they raised us to sit on nails– While I sat around all the time with my little diary, my Turf, my hockey games, Sunday afternoon tragic football games on the toy pooltable white chalkmarked … father and son on separate toys, the toys get less friendly when you grow up–my football games occupied me with the same seriousness of the angels–we had little time to talk to each other. In the fall of 1934 we took a grim voyage south in the rain to Rhode Island to see Time Supply win the Narragansett Special–with Old Daslin we was … a grim voyage, through exciting cities of great neons, Providence, the mist at the dim walls of great hotels, no Turkeys in the raw fog, no Roger Williams, just a trolley track gleaming in the gray rain– We drove, auguring solemnly over past performance charts, past deserted shell-like Ice Cream Dutchland Farms stands in the dank of rainy Nov.—bloop, it was the time on the road, black tar glisten-road of thirties, over foggy trees and distances, suddenly a crossroads, or just a side-in road, a house, or bam, a vista gray tearful mists over some half-in cornfield with distances of Rhode Island in the marshy ways across and the secret scent of oysters from the sea–but something dark and rog-like.— J had seen it before … Ah weary flesh, burdened with a light … that gray dark Inn on the Narragansett Road … this is the vision in my brain as I take the pan from my father and take it to Shammy, moving out of the way for LeNoire and Leo Martin to pass on the way to the office to see the book my father had (a health book with syphilitic backs)— SCENE 25 Someone ripped the pooltable cloth that night, tore it with a cue, I ran back and got my mother and she lay on it half-on-floor like a great poolshark about to take a shot under a hundred eyes only she’s got a thread in her mouth and’s sewing with the same sweet grave face you first saw in the window over my shoulder in that rain of a late Lowell afternoon. God bless the children of this picture, this bookmovie. I’m going on into the Shade.

SCENE 24 “Tiens, Ti Jean, donne ce plat la a Shammy,” my father is saying to me, turning from the open storage room door with a white tin pan. “Here, Ti Jean, give this pan to Shammy.” My father is standing with a peculiar French Canadian bowleggedness half up from a crouch with the pan outheld, waiting for me to take it, anxious till I do so, almost saying with his big frowning amazed face “Well my little son what are we doing in the penigillar, this strange abode, this house of life without roof be-hung on a Friday evening with a tin pan in my hand in the gloom and you in your raincoats—” “II commence a tombez de la neige” someone is shouting in the background, coming in from the door (“Snow’s startin to fall”)—my father and I stand in that immobile instant communicating telepathic thought-paralysis, suspended in the void together, understanding something that’s always already happened, wondering where we were now, joint reveries in a dumb stun in the cellar of men and smoke … as profound as Hell … as red as Hell.—I take the pan; behind him, the clutter and tragedy of old cellars and storage with its dank message of despair–mops, dolorous mops, clattering tear-stricken pails, fancy sprawfs to suck soap suds from a glass, garden drip cans–rakes leaning on meaty rock–and piles of paper and official Club equipments– It now occurs to me my father spent most of his time when I was 13 the winter of 1936, thinking about a hundred details to be done in the Club alone not to mention home and business shop–the energy of our fathers, they raised us to sit on nails– While I sat around all the time with my little diary, my Turf, my hockey games, Sunday afternoon tragic football games on the toy pooltable white chalkmarked … father and son on separate toys, the toys get less friendly when you grow up–my football games occupied me with the same seriousness of the angels–we had little time to talk to each other. In the fall of 1934 we took a grim voyage south in the rain to Rhode Island to see Time Supply win the Narragansett Special–with Old Daslin we was … a grim voyage, through exciting cities of great neons, Providence, the mist at the dim walls of great hotels, no Turkeys in the raw fog, no Roger Williams, just a trolley track gleaming in the gray rain– We drove, auguring solemnly over past performance charts, past deserted shell-like Ice Cream Dutchland Farms stands in the dank of rainy Nov.—bloop, it was the time on the road, black tar glisten-road of thirties, over foggy trees and distances, suddenly a crossroads, or just a side-in road, a house, or bam, a vista gray tearful mists over some half-in cornfield with distances of Rhode Island in the marshy ways across and the secret scent of oysters from the sea–but something dark and rog-like.— J had seen it before … Ah weary flesh, burdened with a light … that gray dark Inn on the Narragansett Road … this is the vision in my brain as I take the pan from my father and take it to Shammy, moving out of the way for LeNoire and Leo Martin to pass on the way to the office to see the book my father had (a health book with syphilitic backs)— SCENE 25 Someone ripped the pooltable cloth that night, tore it with a cue, I ran back and got my mother and she lay on it half-on-floor like a great poolshark about to take a shot under a hundred eyes only she’s got a thread in her mouth and’s sewing with the same sweet grave face you first saw in the window over my shoulder in that rain of a late Lowell afternoon. God bless the children of this picture, this bookmovie. I’m going on into the Shade.

This particular song’s just something that’s been floating around inside me for a long time,” Tate went on. “Is she the one who got away? Yeah. She is. But it’s because she got away that I—that we,” he clarified, “are all here now.” “How do you mean?” the interviewer asked. Tate was silent for several heartbeats, then said, “When I met her, I was playing ball. She knew I wasn’t that good. But she also saw a talent in me I didn’t even know I had. She’s the one who encouraged my music. I lost her after that summer, but it’s because I lost her that Kendrick was even formed. So yeah, she is ‘Everything.’ She’s everything I have and everything I’m missing.” “Would it be safe to assume you work as hard as you do because you’re trying to prove to her what she’s missing?” the interviewer asked. “No,” Tate answered. “Not really.” “That’s a load of crap,” someone muttered in the background. “Okay,” Tate said louder. “Maybe it’s a little true. Did I hope she’d one day hear one of these songs about her and call me up? Sure. I think that’s the whole point of tracks like this. That there’s hope. I mean, that’s what life’s really about, right? Without hope, what the hell does a person have?” “A lot of”—BEEP—“ing fun,” Jace interjected.

A long time ago inside a local ice rink, 15 year olds went to battle to win a game of hockey.  They played for themselves, for their teams, for their coaches, for their towns, and for their families. It was a 0-0 tie in the 2nd period.     Both goalies were outstanding.  But one appeared to be somewhere else. Thinking.  The shot came.    The antagonist wasn’t aiming to break the scoreless tie.  He was living up to his agreement with the other team’s coach.  A coach who wanted his son to be the team's goalie.     He didn’t want a new goalie that could take his team where they have never been.  The playoffs.  A goalie that could secure his team at the top.  The coach watched the shot he bought.      The goalie could have shifted, dodged out of the way, but he was paralyzed.  He dropped to the ice when the puck struck his unprotected neck.     The player skated over to examine the goalie. He had accomplished his task.    And with the money he earned, he can buy the bicycle he always wanted.     The goalie’s father was standing amongst the other parents.  He was enraged that his son didn’t make the save.     He felt the hard work he put into his boy slowly fade, and quickly die out.  He knew how good his son was, and would be.  He knew the puck struck because the goalie let it.  He did not know why.   I groaned as the puck hit me in the arm.  I had pads, but pads can only soften the blow. I squeezed my arm.     My father stood and watched.     My friend fired another shot that whacked me in the throat, knocking me down.  I felt dizzy.      It was frigid on the pond in winter.     This is where I learned to play hockey.  This is also where I learned it was painful to be a goaltender.  I got up slowly, glowering at him.  My friend was perplexed at my tenacity.     “This time, stay down!” And then he took the hardest slap shot I have ever encountered.     The puck tore through the icy air at incredible speed right into my face.     My glove rapidly came up and snatched it right before it would shatter my jaw.  I took my glove off and reached for the puck inside.     I swung my arm and pitched it as fiercely as I could at my friend.     Next time we play, I should wear my mask and he should wear a little more cover than a hat.  I turned towards my father.  He was smiling.  That was rare.     I was relieved to know that I was getting better and he knew it.  The ice cracked open and I dropped through…      The goalie was alone at the hospital.  He got up and opened the curtains the nurse keeps closing at night so he could see through the clear wall.     He eyed out the window and there was nothing interesting except a lonely little tree.  He noticed the way the moonlight shined off the grass and radiated everything else.  But not the tree.  The tree was as colourless as the sky.     But the sky had lots of bright little glowing stars.  What did the tree have?  He went back to his bed and dozed off before he could answer his own question.   Nobody came to visit him at the hospital but his mother.     His father was at home and upset that his son is no longer on the team.  The goalie spot was seized by the team’s original goalie, the coach’s son.     The goalie’s entire life had been hockey.  He played every day as his father observed.  He really wanted a regular father, whatever that was.  A father that cares about him and not about hockey.  The goalie did like hockey, but it was a game.         A sport just like other sports, only there’s an ice surface to play on.  But he did not love hockey.     It was just something he became very good at, with plenty of practice and bruises.     He was silent in his new team’s locker room, so he didn’t assume anyone would come and see how he was doing.

For the very first time in my life, I can’t concentrate. I’ve never had a problem with it before, always able to put singular focus on any task I attempted. Even though I have an amazingly high IQ, I would never have accomplished what I have so far in life without the ability to funnel my thoughts with the precision of a drill team.

The silence surrounding words highlights their importance, assures us that the word was weighed, polished, contemplated, and deserves the light of day. Words without such reins are excessively dumped in the sea of everyday life, such as one purges interior contaminants—dumped far away from us into an atmosphere that we unconsciously pollute and which we all share. Such words exorcise our private dementia but ironically saturate the art until it risks drowning in a bog of mushy cacophony.

. . . my father had been brutal on me, but with him out of my life I had in turn become tough on myself. I knew enough about the game to be a pro but had never learned to have fun at it.

He took a stool two away from Enid. She didn’t look up from her drink or glance his way. On the other side of him a guy wearing a porkpie hat was bouncing his head up and down as though to music but no music was playing and he wasn’t wearing earphones. A rainbow of rusted license plates took up most of the back wall—probably plates representing all fifty states, but Simon wasn’t really up for checking. There were neon signs for Miller High Life and Schlitz. An oddly ornate chandelier hung from the ceiling. This place, like the inn, was all dark wood, but that was the only similarity, like this was the poorest of poor cousins of the inn’s rich dark wood. “What’ll you have?” The barmaid’s hair was the color and texture of the hay on that hayride and done in a quasi mullet that reminded Simon of an ’80s hockey player. She was either a hard forty-five or a soft sixty-five, and there was little question she had seen it all at least twice. “What kind of beer do you have?” he asked. “We have Pabst. And Pabst.” “You choose for me.

Doing things in her own strength never got her far. And sometimes it seemed she was all too keen to plow on regardless of those whispers to stop, rest, and take time to allow God to refresh her heart and spirit. Surrendering to God didn’t mean giving up. It just meant a more active trust that He would work things out for her good, regardless of what that looked like. She could trust Him. With her life. Work.

In the Canadiens’ dressing room, on a wall above the players’ lockers, is a line from John McCrae’s poem, “In Flanders Fields.” It reads: To you from failing hands we throw the torch, be yours to hold it high.

It didn’t matter if someone else scored more goals or had more points or was the league’s MVP; there might be many leaders on the team, but the Rocket was its spirit.

I kept blaming Steve, and then Austin, for not making me a priority in their lives when I did a shit job of making me a priority in my own life too. "I needed to woman up," I tell Abbi. "I needed to go on this assignment to prove to myself that I could do it. That I can still achieve the dreams I put aside. And instead of blaming Steve for that choice, I need to own it. Instead of being angry with Austin for being such an incredible friend, teammate, all around good guy, I need to be worthy of him. And the way I acted at Marissa's wedding was not the woman I want to be.

I’m gonna tell you the same thing I told Olivia. You are not a man who would intentionally betray someone’s trust, someone who loves him, who he loves without a shadow of a doubt.” He twists in my direction. “You wouldn’t hurt that girl if your life depended on it. She’s your whole world. Not hockey. Not that cup sitting pretty in your house right now, the one you’ve been working toward your whole life. Olivia. That girl. She’s your world and she has been right from the beginning. If you took your last breath right now, your final words would be—” “A declaration of how much I love her.

And five minutes in the life of a hockey player?More than enough to score a few points.

When I felt better, I tried to remember what had been beautiful in my life. I did not think about love or how I had wandered all over the world. I did not think about night flights across the ocean or how I played Canadian hockey in Prague. I remembered walking along the brooks, rivers, ponds, and dams to fish. I realized that these were the most beautiful experiences in my life.

Every night at dinner, one kid had to bring a new vocabulary word to the table. We had to say it, spell it, define it and use it in a sentence. As a result, we all have great vocabularies.

And after dinner, we had a mandatory reading hour. At seven o’clock, the whole family assembled in the living room to read books. That was before we did our homework. No phone calls, no television. Just all of us gathered together, reading library books. That’s where I got my lifelong love of reading.

Being a hockey coach and ex-NHL player, I have dealt with a lot of overgrown, testosterone-filled man children in my life. It takes some epic levels of assholism to piss me off.

Watching a couple commit to a life together does something to me. Makes me believe in fairy tales and happily ever afters.

Figure it out. Work through it. You’ll find your answer. What’s my plan? I don’t have one, except to do what I do every day. Keep moving forward. “Get through today? Get through practice, and our games this week, and then I’m going to get through HockeyFest. Probably spend a little extra time on the lake. It’s kind of my happy place.” She nods. “One day at a time, one game at a time. I like that plan. My happy place has always been the weight room. I figure, if I can tackle that, I can tackle anything. You want to know my personal motto? ‘I can do hard things.’ I’ve proven that I can get through a challenge, so I can do it again. I’d say the same for you.

But while Kravitz has a need to perform, with Sam you saw nothing. Things just got done. And when he wasn’t doing, he was thinking—he was doing things inside his head. In the rinks and parks of Snowdon, he learned that if you know everything about everything, people listen. And if you’re willing to do everything, people let you.

In the off-season, it wasn’t games that the players missed—it was their teammates. It was the team.

He had to do his best, and depending on the game—a good night, a bad night, ahead or behind—he had to come up with a few things he hadn’t thought of before. He may have seemed only a cheerleader, even to himself, but in a tone, a gesture, a look in his eye, he needed to get across his message. And do it instantly. “You just played it by the seat of your pants,” he says about coaching those games in Verdun. On the rinks of Willibrord Park, he was learning to become a game coach.

not all storms come to disrupt your life; some come to clear your path

850 square feet. It’s what forced the Bowmans and everyone else on the Avenues outside. And it was these outdoor spaces—not the closed-in world of flats and row houses of Verdun—that defined them.

In so many respects, the Trade Center dead formed a kind of universal parliament, representing 62 countries and nearly every ethnic group and religion in the world. There was an ex-hippie stock broker, the gay Catholic chaplain of the New York City Fire Department, a Japanese hockey player, an Ecuadorian sous chef, a Barbie doll collector, a vegetarian calligrapher, a Palestinian accountant. The manifold ways in which they attached to life testified to the Quranic injunction: that the taking of a single life destroys a universe.

I have very few regrets in life, and all of them involve her.

I have never been so thoroughly fucked in my life. In more ways that one.

No one who values their life will get within ten feet of you.

The most important part of my life isn't hockey or my career. She's sitting in section 106, row 5, and she's my whole fucking world.