On the eve of Sunday April 21st, a few of us flew out of Toronto to Prague for the Ales Hrebesky Memorial lacrosse tournament. This was first time I entered my own team since we won the whole shebang in 2011. I also won with the Boston Megamen last year. No big deal. For me it’s actually more difficult to lose than to win in lacrosse, or pretty much anything in life*.
The team is named after my band “Love You To Death”, which I realize is a terrible team name, but allows us to have some ridiculously poppy, and girly pink jerseys.
We had a huge, overnight flight– during which I was unable to sleep (some weird old lady was lying across the seats next to me, and her gross, bare feet were touching my stuff, and sometimes my leg. Rattled).
We landed, discovered our gear was missing, met up with other team mates, and gathered at The Steakhouse. The Steakhouse, our team sponsor, is an awesome restaurant located next to both the rink and our hotel– all nestled within the Prague suburb of Radotin. By the way, if you tell a cab driver, or train-ticket person “RAD-o-tin”, and not “Rrrrrraaawd-o-teen” they look at you like you’re an alien and have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.
The Steakhouse is one of the only places we’ve found in the Czech Republic that actually sells buffalo wings, but they do this weird thing, where they mix tomato sauce in with the buffalo sauce. Pretty weird. Anyway, I was groggily eating a tomato wing, after being up for 36 hours or whatever, and totally dropped it, sending it rolling down my white sweatshirt. So, there’s this huge, sloppy mess of sauce smeared all over me like I’m a fat kid.
I totally freaked out because it was one of only two sweatshirts I brought, and obviously it was a write-off. We tried wiping it and stuff, but that made things way worse, and ground the sauce further into my sick, white threads.
When I went back up to our hilariously cold-war-era hotel room, I tossed the balled-up shirt onto a table (a surface usually reserved for a telephone and a TV in a normal hotel… items unheard-of in this place. Instead it had an ashtray and a brain/blood stain).
Over the next few days, a bunch of sight-seeing, lacrosse, and drinking happened that I’m not going to talk about.
But on Thursday I was eating Italian-style buffalo wings again, while wearing The Pink Necktie. The Pink Necktie is given to the MVP of our team after each game, where the recipient has to wear it all day and night until the next game. I won it that day, because I’m a superstar and and I ooze success, game-in and game-out**. I was contractually obligated to wear the tie while eating my wings at dinner that night. Well… AGAIN I rolled a wing down my body, and got sauce all over the tie. It probably went through my 5-hole as well.
I went back to the haunted army barracks that was our hotel, grabbed some baby wipes (crucial to one’s comfort in a place with such unforgiving toilet paper) and proceeded to successfully wipe the wing sauce off of my tie. Nice! I couldn’t believe it worked. Maybe that will also work, I thought, for the stains all down the front of my discarded sweatshirt.
Now this is when things got weird… I grabbed my zippy from its heap on the table, and unravelled it…. ONLY TO DISCOVER THAT THE STAINS WERE COMPLETELY GONE! I’m not even kidding you. It’s a thing. I went and got everybody who had seen it get all stained-up and everybody’s mind was blown when they saw that there wasn’t even a trace of the sauce. We never figured out any sort of explanation.
It’s seriously the most unimportant, useless, meaningless miracle to ever happen. But a miracle none-the-less.
I kinda of wish that whatever deity was shelling out miracles that week saved it for the lacrosse floor, because we ended up 6th — our worst finish ever. However, I’ve found that the better we do on the floor is inversely proportional to how much fun we have OFF the floor on that trip each year. And we had a pretty crazy good time.
I don’t like to talk about lacrosse (in these lacrosse blogs on a lacrosse website), but I will say that the tournament is brilliantly run each year, and it’s astounding to see how quickly the European teams are improving at the sport. For the first time in a while, the hosting team won the tournament, which was awesome to see for the 20-year anniversary of the event.
But the real story here is obviously the disappearing stain on my zip-up.***
*this statement does not include my atrocious season with the Barrie Blizzard in CLax this past season.
**this statement does not include my GAA of 15.06 in CLax this past season.
*** or possibly miracle number 2, which was my field-style save in the shootout in the All-Star game at 1:30 in this wonderful video, which I would never in a million years be able to replicate. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u80kwBBF57E&sns=em
