Midnight Hockey by Bill Gaston

Author:Bill Gaston [Gaston, Bill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-385-67253-5
Publisher: Doubleday Canada
Published: 2006-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

THIS SEASON SO FAR

January

CHRISTMAS HAS BEEN ENJOYED and survived. The reason I bring up Christmas is because Christmas is inextricably linked to oldtimer hockey in three ways. One, there’s a break in the schedule so you get even more out of shape. Two, there’s the increased consumption of specialty beers, notably those dark, 8 percent kinds. Reason number three is gravy.

Like lots of oldtimers, I make an excellent gravy. We let the others—wives and aunts and people like that—handle the minor stuff, the brussels sprouts and the cranberry sauce and the weird orange potato–marshmallow crap, and we let them throw the turkey in the oven and turn it on and announce that it should be ready by five. But the actual cuisine, the gravy, gets left to the person who truly knows, who has an intimate way with, fat. That person is typically the oldtimer of the house. I won’t give my gravy secrets away at this point, because I’m in the early stages of writing an oldtimer cookbook. Suffice to say that it’s excellent, and uses dashes of fresh lemon juice, Chardonnay, Bengal curry, goat milk, unbleached flour, fresh cracked pepper, balsamic vinegar, plus—of course—the blackest giblet scunge scraped from the bottom of the turkey pan. So good is my gravy that my family and friends tend to forgo the other stuff and just chug it desperately, letting it run over their faces like marathon runners gulping water at the finish line.

Needless to say, since it’s mostly fat, gravy slows a guy down for a while. Gravy is funny that way. It begins as solid turkey fat, gets melted down and eaten, then becomes oldtimer fat. It’s your basic transfer. But the point is, it can take a number of games to work off. Flushing with beer—the regular, non-Christmas kind—helps.

Also on the Christmas front, the world junior tournament was great again. You can’t beat a close international game. I love it when Canada’s down 3–2 in the third and we start throwing our bodies at everything that moves, and the other team finally coughs up the puck behind the net, generally due to commonsense fear that they’re going to die, and then some freckled mucker from Moose Jaw stuffs it in right through the goalie, to tie it up. Good old Canadian hockey. Then we score a beauty, a three-way pass worthy of the old Habs, to win. Love it.

Back to oldtimers. Midway into this month there was a tournament I’d long been dreading: the Pacific Cup. We Finishing Stars enter every year, and every year I dread it.

It’s in Victoria, so there’s no road trip involved, so most of the fun is gone. It just feels like a bunch of games crammed into a weekend. Also, most of the teams are really good and they have their way with us. Lots are prairie teams, here to get a break from the Canadian winter, which, I’ll take obnoxious pleasure in reminding everyone, we don’t allow here. The prairie teams typically come mostly to golf.

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