Atthe buzzer

Columnist Steve Simmons has had a life-long love affair with the sport of hockey. But even though his spirit is willing, the body just can’t cope with the demands of the game anymore. Now it’s time to say goodbye to a Sunday-night ritual that became far m

The unzipped hockey bag sits on the basement floor, and I find myself staring at it all too often, trying to figure out what to do with it after all these years.

There’s an old pair of Doug Gilmour-like shoulder pads inside, and a helmet in need of some repair, and a relatively new pair of gloves, and the rest — the elbow pads, the neck guard, the shin pads, one with a crack in it, the pants, the shorts with a jock in them, a pair of unsharpened skates and, beside it, a water bottle that really needs to be thrown out.

No one tells you what to do at the end.

No one tells you how you’re supposed to respond when finally, after all these years, from taking shots on the driveway at lunch time, to road hockey all day long on your street growing up, to taking your skates to public school where they had an outdoor rink, to the last 15 or so years of pickup games on Sunday night with the same guys and the same stories, and now you can’t do it anymore.

You can’t do it because your body won’t enable you to do it anymore.

And you love it. And you still want to do it. And you don’t want to stop playing. And it didn’t matter if you were any good at it — I wasn’t — you don’t want to stop hanging with the guys, most of whom you see on Sunday nights from 9-to-11 and never anywhere else.

And you know, deep down, there is this Canadian in you — this hockey lover, this hockey player, this hockey person — that connects you to people you don’t know all over this country. It doesn’t matter what level it is you’re playing; it was the playing that mattered. The Sunday-night game. The Friday-afternoon game.

I figure I started playing ball hockey around the age of 5. I was kind of late to ice hockey; I started at 10. I played goal from about the ages of about 12 to 40, and when I stopped making saves, slow hands, slow feet, I figured that was it. Hockey was over.

Then, one day, the phone rang: “You want to join our pickup game?”

I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know how much a part of me this would become.

I didn’t have any equipment except goalie equipment. I only had goalie skates. I went out, on the relatively cheap, and did the Play It Again Sports thing. I bought used equipment, old equipment, comfortable equipment. And I had no idea whether this was going to be one Sunday, a few weeks, or a few months.

It turned out to be a few decades.

My goal was to keep playing into my 60s. That seemed like the right number. I came up one year short. A few of the guys in our Sunday-night game were older than me. Most are in their 50s, except the sons who now come along to play. Hockey is always about family — and family in our case has always been about hockey.

When I first joined the game, I was one of the slowest, if not the slowest, players on the ice. I was the Brad Marsh or Jason Allison of the pickup game. I could think faster than I could skate.

As time went on, as everybody got older, the game went from slow to slower to slowest. Suddenly, it didn’t seem to matter that you couldn’t keep up. Pretty much all of us were moving at a similar rate.

But that didn’t matter. It didn’t matter the weeks in which you scored a goal or the weeks you didn’t. It didn’t matter if you were on the team that won the game — our games were to five goals and then we changed goalies — most of the time I had no idea what the score was.

What mattered was being there, showing up, having a skate and a sweat, trying out your new stick, having a lot of laughs.

And now when it’s around 8:30 on Sunday night, I look at the clock and my inclination isn’t to get ready for Ray

Donovan — I can PVR that — it’s to get ready for hockey.

Gather the equipment. Grab a towel. Fill the water bottle. Be prepared to be sore on Monday morning. Miss the Academy Awards every year. That was the routine. Now no routine. Hockey’s over.

I can close the equipment bag. It’s like losing an old friend. And I don’t know what to do about it.