I was supposed to get the day off on Saturday. Derek Collins played well as my relief in our previous game (when I somehow ended up in net as a ghost), so he got the nod for Saturday’s game against Brampton.
I suppose a different way to look at it is that I was blessed with the opportunity to run the one door on the bench. A few problems there… A) my hair was a mess and I was too warm to wear my usual headgear of toque… and B) I have totally forgotten what a bench-goalie is expected to do. I actually had to ask someone what door goalies usually operate, and once told, I had to get someone to clarify what “the out door” is in the wacky CLax rules. Also, I’ll compete even at something as trivial as bench-duty, and I was horrified to see that my counterpart running Brampton’s out-door looked, convincingly, to be Jesus. That’s a tough matchup. I would later find out that it was Jay Preece.
I didn’t have too much time to battle Jesus. My team, though handsome, are notoriously slow-starters and left poor Collins alone to face dangling crease guys– maybe ten too many times, and his shattered wreckage was pulled from the game.
I went in. I don’t remember what lacrosse happened.
As chronicled in the above photograph, I spend a lot of time on the ground in various spider monkey poses. This makes me quite a connoisseur of flooring. Here’s a fun fact about the turf in Brampton… It’s got a nice base and squishyness to it. Bounces off of it are predictable in both shots and passes. It’s a nice floor on which to run. However I’m quite certain that the turf itself is made up of ground bits of diamond. God help you if you go knee-down on it with any sort of speed because its going to shred your skin right down to the bone. It’s like the Nazi dude whose face melts at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. And once you’re wound-down on that stuff, matters are only going to get worse as it may be the grubbiest turf in the universe. There’s been at least one band-aid lying somewhere in my zone, literally every single time I’ve played there. And it’s a different band-aid each time. On Saturday, in our home crease, was a pink feather next to the right post. I can’t even imagine what that was all about. Powerade Center staff! Vacuum! Also I think one of you stole a mouth guard that I left in a change room last season.
Anyways, all that being said, it’s one of my favourite floors, and one of my favourite places to play. I had a blast in the game, and my one-time room mate, Steve Fryer played very well in the other net. He and I once listened to, for about 50 minutes, an elderly couple have a crazy fight in a hotel room adjoining ours.
I will say that I was disappointed to see roughly sixty of the Powerade Center faithful not partaking in Dress-Like-an-Empty-Seat Night. If you like lacrosse and live within an 11 hour drive of a Clax town, come to a damn game. There is some crazy lacrosse, 8 million goals per half, diamond floors, pink-feather costumes, and Jesus sightings.
