Goaler Plexus

I've always had really amazing friends. I think this happens because, frankly, you have to be a saint to put up with me, but also because fakers just won't pass muster. I don't have time for people I don't like, and I won't work very hard to pretend otherwise.

So, I've been blessed in the friend department. At times the numbers were thin but they were always high quality. Now I feel like I've got quality and quantity. What a lovely feeling! And that's mainly due to hockey, through which I have met a wealth of people whose very heartbeat says, "hock-ey hock-ey hock-ey," just like mine.

Many of them are goalies, because goalies somehow just find each other. It's a fraternity that I'm so proud to be a part of and on bad nights in goal, that's the group to whom I feel beholden to do better but who I know feel my pain, having been there themselves.

One of these goalie friends is Nicky and she's got a goalie friend who wrote this to her, describing her 5-1 loss the other day:

Sadly, nothing was going to salvage Sunday's game. I was *terrible*.
My luck shifted some later in the game. At one point my toe tie came unlaced, I stepped on it, fell down and landed on the puck.
Sometimes the hockey gods decide you've had enough and step in to save you from yourself.

I don't know if you guys are like me where you have a really visceral reaction to certain aspects of the position? I feel it right in the center of my chest, like where someone would poke you if they were goading you into a fight.

Anyway, I read that and felt it right in that spot. It's just heartbreaking and funny and spot on with the humility and triumph that go hand-in-hand as a goalie.

Honestly, does it get any better? I really don't think it does.