Fifty-six-year-old rookie

I recently decided to learn how to play our national pastime after turning 56 years young.

I didn’t need a lot of prompting since there are numerous sources of inexpensive equipment in my region, plenty of public rink space and time, a diminishing pool of active participants, a wife who is a big fan and very supportive of my efforts to remain young at heart, and a desire to recall the early years of my youth when anything was possible and every dream just waiting to happen.

One of the reasons I didn’t start playing hockey when I was young was due to our family economics. With three boys to cloth and feed money was tight and hockey is an equipment rich sport with $100 helmets, $200 sticks and $300 skates; my family would have had to miss out on other important comforts like electricity. Now it’s easy to visit your local second-hand shop and find all the items you’ll need when you shop during April or May when hockey season comes to an end.

Another reason my brothers and I never learned to play our national pastime was due to the limited number of rinks in my area, and so, the availability of ice time. This relegated the younger generation of players to schedule rink time in the wee hours of the morning - something our parents, loving though they were, unlikely agreed to. Leaving a warm bed before the sun to shovel out the car from the overnight drifts that had accumulated to drive 30 minutes to join the other parents sitting on cold arena seats drinking bad coffee and eating day old donuts didn’t help with the motivation.

Now that I am considered a senior player, pick-up games are being scheduled at much more reasonable times and I have the option to play in the afternoons or late in the evening since work is no longer an obligation.

Another barrier to participation when I was young was the sheer number of kids whose parents nurtured dreams of stardom in their path through the sport where they would enjoy success and financial good fortune. The benches of midget and junior hockey were full of enthusiastic and eager bodies clamouring for more ice time to the coach the skills they had learned that might propel them to the next level of competition.

Now that I’m in my 50s the benches are still full of behinds - only now those same players are hoping to catch their breath and rest between shifts that are too long if they last more than 60 seconds. I find myself averting my gaze from my teammates on the ice as they approach the bench, stick in the air to indicate they are done and it’s my turn to resume my fantasy.

Of course it helps that my wife is a big fan of all things hockey, thinks Mark Messier is handsome, for whom winter is the preferred season and likes that hockey is leading the charge for equality of opportunities for young kids of both sexes. She is always at the ready for a ride to the arena for an afternoon game, to dry my uniform when I come home and listen to me groan when I try to get out of bed the following morning after a match. Without her as my number one fan I may not have had the determination to pursue and enjoy this sport.

So stop dreaming and sign up, do some stretching, dust off that old suitcase that can double as your equipment bag and contact a local arena to find out who runs the pick-up league in your area. It might be your last chance to be a kid again and to enjoy the national pastime we, as Canadians, are lucky to call our own.

Michael Lovely is a resident of Charleston in the Region of Queens Municipality.