The face of my past is full of holes
I was rummaging around in the far reaches of the basement the other day when I came upon a buried relic of the not-so-ancient past: my goalie mask.
It’s been five years since I last suited up and allowed other grown men to shoot hard rubber discs in my general direction. With the Stanley Cup playoffs just wrapping up — and, good or bad, goaltending is always a storyline — it dawned on me that I might be ready for a comeback.
Old goalies hang up their pads for many reasons — injuries, family and work commitments, the sudden realization that allowing other people to fire pucks at you is inherently stupid — but my decision to leave the game of hockey once was perhaps the simplest (and most common) of all.
My wife made me do it.
She sort-of-but-not-really denies this, choosing a version of the narrative in which I came to the understanding that playing hockey didn’t make much sense for both personal and family reasons. She’s right, of course — there was no overt, line-in-the-ice ultimatum issued. But like a stare-down from an enforcer, a message was delivered without words being needed.
Her points, as always, were valid. I hadn’t played much in the previous three years after a job change forced some crazy workdays into my schedule, and yet the huge bag full of goalie stuff continued to sit in the basement, blocking easy access to vital things like Halloween decorations, Christmas ornaments and a decade’s worth of priceless kid art. Hockey requires a set schedule and defined time commitment — especially as a goalie — and making that the priority over the needs of our family seemed pretty selfish.
Like most Canadian kids, I grew up around the game. I first played at a Boys and Girls Club in a predominantly Italian neighbourhood in downtown Toronto. All the Italian kids played on one team and they were called the Leafs. That left me as the backstop for a motley crew that featured representation from a broad coalition of mostly immigrants, who were indoctrinating themselves in Canadian culture one wobbly stride at a time. Not much skating in Uganda. Or Taiwan. Or anywhere else outside of Canada, it seemed. We got shelled, often.
I gave the game up in my teens, choosing to focus on other sports, but took it up again as an adult, cobbling together a hodgepodge of used gear and quickly earning the self-imposed nickname of “Swiss Cheese Edwards.” Over the years, I upgraded my equipment while the quality of my performance remained largely unchanged.
Not that anybody seemed to mind. In recreational hockey with the same 20 players every week and only loosely defined teams, the primary objective isn’t winning, it’s to get a little exercise and to have fun. And nothing is more fun than scoring goals. Goalies who provide the illusion of challenge without actually being any good — a description that fit me perfectly — are ideal.
When I stumbled across the mask this week, I felt a little pang in my chest, a feeling that something missing had suddenly been found. Then my wife yelled down the stairs that it was time to drive my kid to dance class, the next errand in an afternoon full of them. I was planning a bike ride later. So I stuffed the mask back in the bag and smiled.
Old goalies don’t retire, they just let more things slip by.