5, 6, Pickup Sticks

Even if it’s ten blocks away and the rink lights are turned off at ten, you walk — it seems somehow sacrilegious to drive — the snow crunching under your boots. On the way, you pull your stick off your shoulder to fire a small chunk of ice into a snow bank or across the street. As the rink comes into view, you squint to see if there’s a game going on. It’s impossible to know. One night, you’ll be alone, or virtually. The next — same temperature, same highpressure system making for a similarly perfect, starry winter night — there’ll not only be a six-a-side match with three subs per team in full swing, but also a more casual spillover game taking place in the dark on the adjacent, unlighted pleasure-skating rink.

Still, usually, if your timing’s right, people will just be beginning to congregate. Some of the faces might be familiar. Maybe the guy you call the Bumblebee because of the way he defies the laws of physics with his split-second stops, starts, and turns. With any luck, the bright-eyed, sweet Laurence — the best woman player to frequent the rink — will show too. You never see enough of her. Then there are the archetypes: as often as not, there will be a really big — as in fat — guy who plays like a cat, all deft passes and slick, minimal manoeuvres and very little actual skating. But one of the best things is that the players will never be the same from one evening to the next.

In the changing room, one or two will be putting on their skates, but there is little chatter — at most a “ça va bien?,” a “la glace a l’air bonne,” or a “crisse, mes patins sont plus serrés que jamais.” Everyone is eager to join the four or five others already on the ice, busy practising their shots, playing hog, or otherwise waiting for a game to begin.

Once the magic number — six if people are particularly impatient, more often eight — has been reached, someone will corral whoever is on the rink to gather at centre ice and throw their sticks into a pile. Then the youngest — universally accepted as the least devious (as well as he to whom menial tasks are assigned) — drops to his knees and gathers the sticks in front of him. Closing his eyes or making a show of looking above or off to the side, he then throws a stick toward one net with his right hand while throwing another toward the other net with his left. In this way, teams are drawn.

If someone is hung up on formalities, there’ll be a faceoff. More often, a player on one team will just slide the game puck over to someone on the other team as the signal to start playing. The first minutes tend to be chaotic and confused, as players figure out who exactly their teammates are, who is playing where, and who is worth passing to — all the while skating too hard, too fast because it feels so good to be out on the ice again.

Gradually, the game evens out and hits its stride. Coordinated rushes explode out of own zones as if practised for months. Rinkwide passes land on the blades they were intended for as if sent FedEx. Shots wend their way through impossible forests of skates and sticks as if pulled by an invisible thread.

Some nights, the nights when the rink is dominated by eighteen- to twentyfive- year-olds blessed with endless cardio and strong hockey skills, it will be almost forbiddingly fast. Other nights, when the mix is, well, more mixed — an eleven-year-old tagging along behind his older brother and his buddies, a few women in figure skates, maybe another not-so-young dad out on evening leave, perhaps a guy who is even older, creaking around for what is clearly the first time in years — it will be, if anything, too slow.

But usually a game will be both fast and slow. In the unwritten code of pickup hockey, democracy is primordial: anyone who shows up gets to play. If a player isn’t very good, the game might whir around them at a dizzying speed. But once they pick up a loose puck or are fed a pass, the game will decelerate abruptly. They’ll be allowed to skate a little, take a shot, or make a pass themselves. It’s a nurturing gesture one wouldn’t expect from a group of mostly young men, and it suggests that their own first forays onto the intimidating ice to play with the big kids are still fresh in their memories. And if someone is so unschooled in rink etiquette as to strip the weaker player of the puck as soon as he gets it, that person — typically a thirteen- or fourteen-yearold hotshot — will usually have the puck unceremoniously stripped from him, often by his own teammate, and see it returned to the weaker player.

These accommodations, coupled with constantly changing lineups as new players come and winded players go and trades are made to even out teams in terms of strength and number, mean that nobody takes the score seriously, if they bother keeping track of it at all. It is thus understood that all goals are not equal — players will pass up an easy tap-in and instead try an elegant deke or spinarama, a drop pass, or a tic-tac-toe. In this way, pickup is more about the beauty of hockey than any final result.

And if no one takes the score seriously, no one takes the game too seriously either. This makes the hockey more imaginative and the whole atmosphere at the rink less competitive and more celebratory — of the sport, of winter, of the country, of the culture.