[Hakan]

Wonderful article on shinny hockey from the Walrus magazine and contains some ethics for the game:

http://www.walrusmagazine.com/articl...pickup-sticks/

If someone is hung up on formalities, there’ll be a faceoff. More often, a player on one team will just slide the game puck over to someone on the other team as the signal to start playing. The first minutes tend to be chaotic and confused, as players figure out who exactly their teammates are, who is playing where, and who is worth passing to — all the while skating too hard, too fast because it feels so good to be out on the ice again.

Gradually, the game evens out and hits its stride. Coordinated rushes explode out of own zones as if practised for months. Rinkwide passes land on the blades they were intended for as if sent FedEx. Shots wend their way through impossible forests of skates and sticks as if pulled by an invisible thread.

Some nights, the nights when the rink is dominated by eighteen- to twentyfive- year-olds blessed with endless cardio and strong hockey skills, it will be almost forbiddingly fast. Other nights, when the mix is, well, more mixed — an eleven-year-old tagging along behind his older brother and his buddies, a few women in figure skates, maybe another not-so-young dad out on evening leave, perhaps a guy who is even older, creaking around for what is clearly the first time in years — it will be, if anything, too slow.

But usually a game will be both fast and slow. In the unwritten code of pickup hockey, democracy is primordial: anyone who shows up gets to play. If a player isn’t very good, the game might whir around them at a dizzying speed. But once they pick up a loose puck or are fed a pass, the game will decelerate abruptly. They’ll be allowed to skate a little, take a shot, or make a pass themselves. It’s a nurturing gesture one wouldn’t expect from a group of mostly young men, and it suggests that their own first forays onto the intimidating ice to play with the big kids are still fresh in their memories. And if someone is so unschooled in rink etiquette as to strip the weaker player of the puck as soon as he gets it, that person — typically a thirteen- or fourteen-yearold hotshot — will usually have the puck unceremoniously stripped from him, often by his own teammate, and see it returned to the weaker player.

These accommodations, coupled with constantly changing lineups as new players come and winded players go and trades are made to even out teams in terms of strength and number, mean that nobody takes the score seriously, if they bother keeping track of it at all. It is thus understood that all goals are not equal — players will pass up an easy tap-in and instead try an elegant deke or spinarama, a drop pass, or a tic-tac-toe. In this way, pickup is more about the beauty of hockey than any final result.