Post by Jim H. on Feb 26, 2024 20:10:31 GMT -5
Sunset. That’s when Old Bucks hockey starts now. That’s when we drove down Cold Soil Road bound for the rink. The darkness of winter was dispelled, the fields outside Lawrenceville scattered with does grazing on brown grass, a few of them young, judging by sportive gambols done under the last rays of the sun. We got to Tsai and saw the exact same scene in human form: Mites out on the ice, their moms in the stands, so proud of their little benders—the only time in the kids’ careers that their hockey bags will be bigger than they are. How cheerful the moms looked in conversation, whiling away another practice connecting, for once, in three dimensions, not two. But give them another year and they’ll be shouting like stevedores: “Hey Stripes! Stop stealing the game!”
We joked with Scott Shapiro as we passed the moms. “See. That’s what you have to look forward to,” we said, gesturing toward the ice. Scott laughed and got out his phone and showed us a picture. “I’m bribing my daughter to like hockey,” he said. The photo showed him in his Old Bucks jersey, red side out, with his daughter on his shoulders, also wearing a red jersey. “But Daddy where’s my blue one?” she asked.
Curiosity finally got the better of us and we asked Brian Urban to sharpen our skates. We wanted to compare the new-fangled Old Bucks machine to the old-fashioned Wissota in our basement. We wondered whether a robot can really replace the manual operation of gliding the skate holder back and forth across the plated table to get that radius of the hollow just right. Having done our own skates for 20 years, it took a tremendous leap of faith to place them in the hands of someone else. Check that—something else. Nor was it encouraging to hear the machine, once our first skate was locked into place, make a noise of a pitch that had us expecting a belt to break and to see bearings rolling across the floor. But the skates were sharpened, the deed was done, and Brian gave them back to us, saying, “I’m not gonna lie to you. That thing made the weirdest noise when I first turned it on.”
So how many Old Bucks goalies does it take to keep the score of the game in the single digits? Turns out three: Dan, Vinnie and Brian. This system of easing Vinnie back into action continues to work splendidly judging by Week 23. Vinnie played for an hour, and considering that ice time costs $410 an hour, he probably got his money’s worth. Red had both Davids on its squad, Ben and Andrew, who believe in giving it everything you got—and then doubling it. Blue had the Freilings, who believe the exact same thing, except Bob Jr. was skiing at Jack Frost all day, saw 30 skaters were signed up to play, and decided not to come. Thus we were able to pre-identify weaknesses in Blue’s lineup (but more on that later). Blue actually struck first to lead 1-0. Ken Blankstein made a nice outlet to Joe Tona who skated up ice and finished with the sharpest-angled shot you could possibly take, from literally outside the face-off circle, and it still went in. But Red quickly got the equalizer from Dave Boggs who’s really contracted his shooting range. Used to be Caitlyn Clark, now it’s Lew Alcindor.
As an index of just how hot the goalies were, Mark Herr was left all alone on Danny’s doorstep, got the perfect pass from Aaron Kibbey, and was poised to bury it in his first goal in forever. Just the day before he had been in Central Park skating with Sarah and Cheeky, not caring the ice was literally melting beneath his feet, because Manhattan works its magic even under the those conditions. But a goal in Old Bucks would beat even that. However Danny stabbed the shot with his toe and kicked it away. So close! On the bright side Mark’s memo to himself “Score goal before end of year” is still valid because he didn’t write which year.
In the meantime, both Tonas and Mark Mayer became reacquainted with lightning snags from Vinnie’s glove that robbed them of glory. And this went for Dan and Brian too, both showing sensational stuff between the pipes. In defiance of norms, Old Bucks took a 5-4 game deep into the latter half of 90 minutes and then our little scratch pad reads, in an unfamiliar hand,
One more
One more again
to signify we were on the ice for Red’s next two goals and someone on the bench took the liberty of recording them, rather cryptically, without citing who scored. That we don’t know ourselves, and we were on the ice, makes us just as culpable as a few other Blue players who let down their guard on four unanswered goals: Paul Egan, for example, who’s a fixture in the locker room, a fixture at the afterparty, and proved he can be a fixture on the ice too. Bob Freiling—so electric but still prone to nuisance trips of power when you need him most. Eddie Odoski who spent most of the game avoiding Mike Valenzano. Indeed, they’re like the two drummers in the Grateful Dead—if they get too close it’s mutual annihilation. Red won 9-5 but Alan Blankstein, on Blue, got the last word, striding the whole length of the locker room to gloat over his goal to Brian: “I think you’re dad would have saved that one.”
At TJ’s the perfect ratio of people to pies obtained: 12:3, also known as the “Golden Ratio” because it’s found throughout nature, including the spiral shape of nautilus shells. Here’s news: the afterparty doesn’t eat plain pizzas anymore. Whereas for years that was all it ate. This we found out when suggestions for a third pie were entertained, and we said “plain!” only to be laughed to scorn by many people. The rule now is: two topping minimum for all pizzas. For Week 23 it was pepperoni and onion, sausage and pepper, and meatball and truffles. We spent most of the time talking to Joe Bruno about his time as a liquor wholesaler down at the waterfront under the alias Joey Rigatoni. He gave us the whole history of Tito’s Handmade Vodka which we later cross-referenced with Wikipedia, finding out that’s it’s not handmade at all. It’s distilled in huge industrial-sized vats that hold thousands of gallons of product. It was even sued to remove “Handmade” from the label but the suit went nowhere. Which begs the question: Why is Trump, just by fudging his numbers to the detriment of no one, liable for 350 million in fines while Tito’s Handmade Vodka can get off scot-free? Seems to be a two-tiered justice system: one for Trump and one for Tito.
We joked with Scott Shapiro as we passed the moms. “See. That’s what you have to look forward to,” we said, gesturing toward the ice. Scott laughed and got out his phone and showed us a picture. “I’m bribing my daughter to like hockey,” he said. The photo showed him in his Old Bucks jersey, red side out, with his daughter on his shoulders, also wearing a red jersey. “But Daddy where’s my blue one?” she asked.
Curiosity finally got the better of us and we asked Brian Urban to sharpen our skates. We wanted to compare the new-fangled Old Bucks machine to the old-fashioned Wissota in our basement. We wondered whether a robot can really replace the manual operation of gliding the skate holder back and forth across the plated table to get that radius of the hollow just right. Having done our own skates for 20 years, it took a tremendous leap of faith to place them in the hands of someone else. Check that—something else. Nor was it encouraging to hear the machine, once our first skate was locked into place, make a noise of a pitch that had us expecting a belt to break and to see bearings rolling across the floor. But the skates were sharpened, the deed was done, and Brian gave them back to us, saying, “I’m not gonna lie to you. That thing made the weirdest noise when I first turned it on.”
So how many Old Bucks goalies does it take to keep the score of the game in the single digits? Turns out three: Dan, Vinnie and Brian. This system of easing Vinnie back into action continues to work splendidly judging by Week 23. Vinnie played for an hour, and considering that ice time costs $410 an hour, he probably got his money’s worth. Red had both Davids on its squad, Ben and Andrew, who believe in giving it everything you got—and then doubling it. Blue had the Freilings, who believe the exact same thing, except Bob Jr. was skiing at Jack Frost all day, saw 30 skaters were signed up to play, and decided not to come. Thus we were able to pre-identify weaknesses in Blue’s lineup (but more on that later). Blue actually struck first to lead 1-0. Ken Blankstein made a nice outlet to Joe Tona who skated up ice and finished with the sharpest-angled shot you could possibly take, from literally outside the face-off circle, and it still went in. But Red quickly got the equalizer from Dave Boggs who’s really contracted his shooting range. Used to be Caitlyn Clark, now it’s Lew Alcindor.
As an index of just how hot the goalies were, Mark Herr was left all alone on Danny’s doorstep, got the perfect pass from Aaron Kibbey, and was poised to bury it in his first goal in forever. Just the day before he had been in Central Park skating with Sarah and Cheeky, not caring the ice was literally melting beneath his feet, because Manhattan works its magic even under the those conditions. But a goal in Old Bucks would beat even that. However Danny stabbed the shot with his toe and kicked it away. So close! On the bright side Mark’s memo to himself “Score goal before end of year” is still valid because he didn’t write which year.
In the meantime, both Tonas and Mark Mayer became reacquainted with lightning snags from Vinnie’s glove that robbed them of glory. And this went for Dan and Brian too, both showing sensational stuff between the pipes. In defiance of norms, Old Bucks took a 5-4 game deep into the latter half of 90 minutes and then our little scratch pad reads, in an unfamiliar hand,
One more
One more again
to signify we were on the ice for Red’s next two goals and someone on the bench took the liberty of recording them, rather cryptically, without citing who scored. That we don’t know ourselves, and we were on the ice, makes us just as culpable as a few other Blue players who let down their guard on four unanswered goals: Paul Egan, for example, who’s a fixture in the locker room, a fixture at the afterparty, and proved he can be a fixture on the ice too. Bob Freiling—so electric but still prone to nuisance trips of power when you need him most. Eddie Odoski who spent most of the game avoiding Mike Valenzano. Indeed, they’re like the two drummers in the Grateful Dead—if they get too close it’s mutual annihilation. Red won 9-5 but Alan Blankstein, on Blue, got the last word, striding the whole length of the locker room to gloat over his goal to Brian: “I think you’re dad would have saved that one.”
At TJ’s the perfect ratio of people to pies obtained: 12:3, also known as the “Golden Ratio” because it’s found throughout nature, including the spiral shape of nautilus shells. Here’s news: the afterparty doesn’t eat plain pizzas anymore. Whereas for years that was all it ate. This we found out when suggestions for a third pie were entertained, and we said “plain!” only to be laughed to scorn by many people. The rule now is: two topping minimum for all pizzas. For Week 23 it was pepperoni and onion, sausage and pepper, and meatball and truffles. We spent most of the time talking to Joe Bruno about his time as a liquor wholesaler down at the waterfront under the alias Joey Rigatoni. He gave us the whole history of Tito’s Handmade Vodka which we later cross-referenced with Wikipedia, finding out that’s it’s not handmade at all. It’s distilled in huge industrial-sized vats that hold thousands of gallons of product. It was even sued to remove “Handmade” from the label but the suit went nowhere. Which begs the question: Why is Trump, just by fudging his numbers to the detriment of no one, liable for 350 million in fines while Tito’s Handmade Vodka can get off scot-free? Seems to be a two-tiered justice system: one for Trump and one for Tito.