Real Hockey in Real Hockey Weather

I didn’t post a blog yesterday. I just felt like watching some hockey and football. The hockey was especially enjoyable. Pittsburgh and Buffalo battled each other into a shootout overtime in front of about 80,000 fans. They played outdoors in high wind and swirling snow, conditions that so many NHL players were accustomed to in their growing up years.

I grew up about 45 minutes from Buffalo, on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls, and I played hockey as a kid. The CCM skates I purchased when I was 16 are hanging in my garage. Maybe, just maybe, I will strap them on again. At any rate, the televised outdoor hockey game carried me back to my Canadian youth, when winter coaxed many neighborhood friends and me out of our homes and onto a frozen street or pond for a vigorous hockey game. We chose sides and competed until snow covered the ice, and then we cleared the snow and resumed the battle.

After each game we trudged home bearing the marks of victory or defeat. In either case the marks were identical: chapped and bruised skin. In spite of the discomfort, I’m certain we had more fun playing real hockey in real hockey weather than kids today have playing video hockey indoors.

So I didn’t post a blog yesterday. Instead, I indulged my nostalgia. And that’s not a bad thing, especially if memories of growing up are worth reviving.

I think kids today should enjoy wholesome fun with friends. No one should grow old and remember only a world filled with violence, mistrust, isolation, and impersonal video games. Of course the best memory of our youth should include the time we believed on the Savior.

“Remember your Creator in the days of your youth, before the days of trouble come and the years approach when you will say, ‘I find no pleasure in them’” (Ecclesiastes 12:1).