tread softly and carry a custom-made stick.

My 3rd year University English teacher once taught us that there is no more uncapitivating start to a sentence than a statement beginning with, "there are...". Only Shakespeare could get away with it, as in, "there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreampt of in your philosophy", but he was Shakespeare. So anyway, there are somethings that one takes pride in having a purely prejudical dislike of, and one of those for me was hockey. Beer and hockey. Beer, hockey, and men who partake of them. The island I grew up on wasn't so into it, mostly because the only time anyone got to skate, without ferrying over to the other island that was rich and had "facilities", was on the rare occasion that a small lake froze over. The one winter I went figure skating on Cusheon Lake, someone fell through the ice and was found bloated and yellow sometime mid March by a fisherman; he caught on the hook. Eew. I never swam in that lake again without looking down.

Flash forward to the move to Powell River, home of the Paper Kings, which has furnished the NHL with some 12 players since 1950. No really, those are good figures. The mill paid to a have a state-of-the-art recreation complex with 2 ice rinks constructed, ostensibly to foster culture in the men that came to get their fingers pinched off in the rollers. They even played host to the Soviet Olympic team in 1978! This place was crap ass redneck paradise, and everyone watched hockey and drank beer, drove trucks and littered in the woods. So naturally, I swore I would never watch a goddamn hockey game in my life. I had already watched an entire Stanley Cup playoff when I was 9 in a futile attempt to bond with my father; turns out it was the first and last playoff he ever watched, and thus my brief liason with the sport was also concluded.

Then yesterday, my sister invited me to the pantomime show of Sinbad the Sailor, admission by donation, and hot damn, the bitch was sold out! Just across the hall, was the queue for the hockey game, so the options were: go home and watch movie; simple enough, or stay and watch hockey game; unknown territory, possibly hostile. I complained the seats were harder than a catholic priest at a scout camp, but she prevailed, and $13 later, we were in said seats, waiting for the action to begin. A couple of things were immediately obvious: you have to bring something that makes a lot of noise, like an airehorn or a set of Scottish pipes, and you should be extremely grateful to our sponsors, Armitage Men's Ware, the cities ONLY supplier of skate boarding gear, and to Coast Realty, for selling you your home at 8 times its true market value.

The home team was playing against a team from South Surrey, and if you know anything about South Surrey, you would well expect at least 3 Singh's and perhaps a Kumar or 2, but, alas, they somehow managed to fill the entire hockey team with nothing but whities, despite the inherent handicap of their home demographic. Though now that I think upon it, Surrey is fairly evenly divided into former landlord-turned-security-guard Indo-Canadians, and poor, white ex-Euro trash that spill their slurpees on the skytrain and like to pry the doors open between stations so they spit out of them. So, shit, I guess hockey is still as white and the stuff it's played on, and that is pretty disappointing.

Despite the initial let down, I couldn't help but feel by heart beat quicken when the teams took the ice and all the noise started. I mean, it sounds like bullshit, but the athleticism of the sport is amazing. It's one thing, like the crappy, lesser sports of football and baseball, to run around, with your feet, on the ground, manipulating a ball-thingy, but it is another thing entirely to do this while skating on ICE, CAUTION SLIPPERY! It was pretty damn cool. And it was a good game; lots of drama, tension, overtime. There was compulsive, almost compelling, shouting, standing up and booing the referee for every penalty, and humming along to the tune of the "final countdown" at every face-off. This experience may even be worth repeating, but only until the swelling goes down.

To sum up: What's the most exciting part of leprosy hockey?

The face off in the corner.