Because of the equipment, hockey is altogether different than other leagues. If you run with a beer league softball or basketball team, it’s possible to pull most any athletic friend onto the team for an evening. Not so with hockey. Very few people have a helmet, preferably with a cage, mouthguard, gloves, shoulder pads, shin guards, hockey pants, shoulder pads, neck guard, ice skates, elbow pads and two sticks in case one gets broken.
Worse still is the horrifying idea of losing your goalie for a night. In a bring-your-own-pads league, you might as well forfeit.
Curt Jones, Exchange’s third-leading scorer, goes three-hole on the Pineapple’s net-minder. The score is now 3-0.
Around now is when the game should start getting chippy. If this were the pros, there would already be a tooth or a jersey on the ice – maybe both – and that most cherished tradition of hockey, watching two Eastern European goons wallop each other for reasons of regional pride, would have been on in full force. Pineapples’ team captain Doug Byrnes tells me that in Poughkeepsie and Newburgh’s hockey leagues, guys throw down left and right.
“But that’s not the character of this league, we all try to get along and just play the sport the best we can,” said the 10-year veteran. “We’re here for the hockey, you know? Nothing else.”
There’s a lot of cursing on the floor for the rest of the night. The guys in the green shirts try to make something happen in the third period, but Tom Papadopoulos, the Exchange keeper, is lights-out.
In the third period, sparks fly as a Pineapple and Exchange player cling to each other for a fleeting, fuming moment. My pen zips to my paper as my eyes widen, ready to see some old-man-versus-old-man hockey fight action, but they disengage in the name of sportsmanship.
The closest we get to such impact is deep in the third, when a pair of Pineapple defenders collide, torso-to-torso, desperately trying to defend an incoming Exchange attack, leading to a man-up Exchange goal. Spectators laughed, as did players, who at this point were already thinking about the ritual post-game beer that gives these leagues their names. (True, there are tales of past softball leagues where players drank during the games, but that was a different time; the people who were young then are now the town elders; they know how crazy it was, and their taxes cover police overtime and insurance policies, so we’re unlikely to ever see those wild times again.)
Matt Robinson of Pineapples scored his team’s lone goal at the end of the first. It was all Exchange for the rest of the night. The final score was 6-1, boosting Exchange’s record to 10-3, while the Pineapples fell to 5-7.
On the way out of the arena both teams were all smiles. You wouldn’t know the winners from the losers. The first round, and some pizza and buffalo wings, is on Mirabella’s. No one is in serious pain and everyone is warm, happy, and full of finger-food and good beer.
Maybe it’s better that these guys aren’t pitching punches and bashing boards. Considering how wild beer leagues can get – how charged and dangerous it can be to go all-out against excitable sometimes-athletes, and considering the potential for adults to injure themselves on foolish plays – maybe a relaxed beer league is the best kind of beer league.
After all, these guys have work in the morning.
