Post by Old Bucks Admin on Feb 20, 2009 9:02:39 GMT -5
Week 22 was an oddball kind of game, insofar as Blue grossed 12 goals but netted only 9, having received deductions for everything from offsides, to kicking the puck, to making a two line pass with 6 men on the ice, one of whom was embellishing a hooking penalty. Even so, such legal exactitudes never constricted the flow of the game, which was as free as a freshly primed keg of beer, and doubly intoxicating. Craig Allen kicked off the scoring for Red, and looked surprisingly sharp for someone who had just spent a month sitting in ski lifts and snowplowing down bunny slopes. Then Doug MacDowell, standing in for brother Ned in the Blue backfield, ripped one from the point and tied it up. After Larry Johnson traded goals with Brian Urban the game was 2-2 and looking even. Then a surprising thing happened. Red cranked out three quick goals to go up 5-2 and Kenny panicked, thinking he’d be charged with stacking teams again. He immediately sent Blue Dave Major, whose combination blue pinny and red sleeves gave him the decidedly ambiguous air of a half-caste without a tribe. But Blue’s play henceforth was anything but ambiguous. They began to score in a manner that skipped over trickle and stream and went straight to flood, as if Red hadn’t shut down their offense at all but just dammed it up to bursting stage. Jim Heffern bagged three goals during this time, Doug MacDowell got his second of the game, and Dan Dougherty and Huck Fairman both had one. While the Red bench squirmed in astonishment, Blue brimmed with confidence, and was so unconcerned about the game that they passed the time between shifts engaged in small talk, asking Bill MacDowell about his recent vacation, or admiring Brian Urban’s new skates, which his wife had bought off the Internet in a special buy one get one deal—buy one skate, get the other skate free. Saunders himself ceased to harp on Blue’s shortcomings and instead focused on recruiting for the upcoming Hooter’s Cup. Then a shocking thing happened: Vinnie volunteered the score and Blue found out it was tied at sevens! They couldn’t believe it. They thought they were winning by at least two or three goals. They wondered whether this was just more Red skullduggery at work, or whether their offensive explosion had cast a kind of smoky pall over the ice that obscured their success. What’s worse, Mark Egner soon scored and put Red up by one, a setback that made every follicle of Saunders’ meticulously shorn head quiver with exasperation. Blue was left with only one choice: put themselves in the hands of fate and hope to goodness fate didn’t falter. Sure enough, Jim Heffern got his fourth goal of the night and tied the game at eights. Then, with the clock winding down, Kip Thomas turned a fortuitous bounce of the puck into a breakaway, and cut loose for the Red goal looking like the tortoise in the cartoon who deploys from under his shell a fire-spewing jet engine that allows him to finally overtake the rabbit and win the race. On a shot that made up in effectiveness what it lacked in imagination, he wristed the puck past Vinnie and got the game-winning goal. Some said afterward it was a defining moment in Kip’s career and surely punched his ticket into the Old Bucks Hall of Fame. Kip himself was more demure, merely commenting that he hadn’t felt so happy since Week 21 when he got the best spot in the parking lot.
