Tell me if this has ever happened to you: you hear of a street hockey tournament breaking out, but then, you realize too late that you left your stick in the other car and can’t take part?
One of my Trenton contacts called me Friday to tell me there was a three-on-three tournament breaking out up on 13th Street, so I figured I’d head up there, snap a few pictures for the paper, then grab the stick out of the back seat and dominate the young fellas, score a few goals and add to my record-breaking career totals.
But I had the wrong car, so all I could do was my job.
Some people might think it strange that I keep a hockey stick in the company car, but I do it for a couple of reasons: you never know when you might chance upon a game on the street, and also, it’s a handy piece of wood to have in the vehicle if you’re ever the victim of a carjacking attempt on New Glasgow west side – because I figure a solid butt-end to the face will drive the enthusiasm right out of anyone trying to steal a car. And not just the enthusiasm – their teeth, too.
Street hockey in Canada is a rite of passage for Canadian boys (and girls now, too). At the risk of sounding like a cranky old curmudgeon who wishes it were 1985 again (awesome year, by the way), you don’t see kids out playing hockey on the street like we used to. Although, up on 13th
in Trenton, along with other little nooks and crannies around Pictou County, there are kids who are out all the time, chasing little orange balls around the asphalt, yelling ‘car!’ and clearing the street when they spot an approaching vehicle.
Every few years in Canada, you’ll heard of a town or city that tries to ban street hockey, but that usually doesn’t go over too well with the people. We’re like those gun nuts in the United States of America: they refuse to let go of their firearms, and we refuse to hand over our street hockey sticks.
If the Right to Bear Hockey Sticks isn’t in the Constitution of Canada, it should be.
* * *
Non-Sports Thought of the Week:
• When roughly 10 firefighters in Tatamagouche used an inflatable boat to rescue a dog stranded on an ice floe this week (the border collie had been missing from its owners for two days), you have to think ‘good job, boys – so glad you had that boat laying around.’
If it had been just some guy stuck on an ice floe because he thought he could outsmart Mother Nature, the small trace of evil that is in all of us might be tempted to make him swim ashore just to watch him do it – for our amusement, and perhaps thinking this would be an excellent learning opportunity for him. But if it’s an animal in peril, we do what is necessary.
Other Random Sports Thoughts:
• The baseball season is only a couple of days old, but it looks like the Toronto Blue Jays have been mathematically eliminated from the pennant race (old Dave Letterman joke). They’ll need a hundred things to go right this season to avoid being mediocre, if not bad.
• You can’t give the Hart Trophy (for the NHL’s most valuable player) to Connor McDavid of the Edmonton Oilers, not when you miss the playoffs as spectacularly as the Oilers have this season.
Kevin Adshade is a sportswriter with The News. His column appears each Saturday.
