The Bitch is Back

My back aches, my groin muscles complain with every step, my glutes are sore.

I'M SO HAPPY!!!! :)

My return to the ice after 6 weeks of no hockey was a success. I played well, my team played well, and we stuffed the blue team in regulation 4-2. (We won't talk about that extra 4th period where I was the only goalie and had to play in the enemy net for the final 10 minutes. I understand and didn't mind, but yuck. What a mindfuck.)

I'll just bullet point this sucker:

• Highlight was stoning the best player on the blue team. Maybe he was taking it easy on me by not shooting high, but I stopped him on a big breakaway, and got a toe on several more of his shots. All good ones, but I was motivated. I wanted to shut him down. Beauty. That felt awesome.
• Took me a good 15 minutes to not feel like I was tripping over my feet. I was definitely a little wobbly, like those small muscles that deal with balance were out of practice. 
• I was surprised, however, by how strong my legs still felt. No biggie getting up from the fly, which is how I hurt myself initially. Made some big lateral pushes from the posts for a couple of saves. Real proud of those for reading the pass correctly. 
• I would say my rebound control was lousy but, frankly, it always is, so nothing new there.
• TONS of new people at novice, though some are quite good and probably should be playing C, unless they just like the easy pace of novice. It's great that this group is growing. I like my teammates. They were fantastic last night. And Mitch was there! Everything's better when Mitch is there. I think because he was always so nice to me during some rough early months when I was going to drop-ins and he was the only one I knew and he didn't pretend to not know me, even though I sucked so bad. I'll always love him for that.
• You need that as a new goalie. You need people to say, "Man, that sucked" and you need people to say, "Good save!" even if you only make one save all game. You need SOME air in your tires all the time or else, you have no motivation to keep going. 
• My knee hurt the entire time out there. Controlling that blade dug into the ice is exactly what my knee doesn't like right now. Felt like I was going to take my gear off and it was going to be swollen up like a grapefruit. But it wasn't. And it doesn't feel any worse today than it has the last 6 weeks, so I'm calling it a success. 
• The brace was absolutely no problem didn't even notice it. Don't know if it helped, either, but if I can't feel it, it obviously isn't hurting.

Here's the thing: I started playing goal because I had to. Like, if I hadn't tried to play, I would have looked back on my life when I'm 90 and thought, "Dammit. Why didn't I do that?" And really, when you feel that way about something, you KNOW you have to do it. You have no choice. You have to honor that instinct.

So to not play for 6 weeks, which I realize is not THAT long if you think about how long some guys go without playing, even as pros (*hugs Brusty*), was like a part of me was missing. Sure, I missed it less as time went on, but then as soon as work stress started to lift, there it came back again. I had to have it.

I've been avoiding this comparison because I didn't want to seem like I'm just trying to be shocking (which I'm not inherently averse to, but I'm quite serious about this), but I want to play goal like I want a good lay. You know the feeling I mean? Like you just need to get fucked until you're limp. That's exactly the inner tension I feel when I can't play for a long time. It's nasty. It's fabulous. And nothing else can scratch that itch. I had this one toe save, literally off the plastic cowling over the toe of my skate, that was worthy of a cigarette after. Heh. Yeah. Hockey is amazing.