The Big Game

Whew, what a game. It’s hard to believe that goaltending could be such a factor, but what can you do? I’m talking, of course, about my kid playing in the annual MAHG Hockey tournament in St-Laurent. What did you think I was talking about?

We got a call on Friday from the coach of the local West Island hockey organization inviting our little man to participate in an inter-city tournament. I’m still trying to get my head around the fact that my five year-old can skate circles around his old man, yet somehow after only five months of exposure to the good ol’ hockey game, he gets a called up to the bigs.

Well, okay, it is pre-novice, and the call probably had more to do with the team not being able to find anyone else to play, but parents never let facts stand in the way of pride.

The team that called was the West Island Habs. This prompted all the predictable comparisons to the big league Habs and their current roster of minor league call-ups. At least I can technically say my kid played for the Habs in Montreal. St-Laurent is Montreal, right?

It was the first ever tournament for us hockey-parent virgins and it was something of an eye-opener. The first revelation was how seriously some parents seemed to be taking a pre-novice tournament, considering that everyone got the same medal at the end of the event. Another inexplicable irritant was that parents were charged admission to see their own kids play. Why not just include that in the cost of participation? Dumb.

The real moment of agro came from the cleverly orchestrated cash-sucking photograph scamaroo. This involved a very slick team of photographers snapping pics of your kid playing in a game in which you just paid a participation fee, then paid again to watch, only to have the same pics ransomed back to you for a small fortune. Of course we had to buy our photos because like many other items in our house (phones, remote controls, a matching shoe) the camera was MIA as we fumbled to get our child and his hockey luggage out the door. They saw us coming.

And if that weren't enough, I still don’t know what the hell MAHG stands for!

In the end the game was a treat to watch, even though our team didn’t have a goalie. I don’t mean our goalie was bad, I mean we literally didn’t have a goalie. It was decided after the game that, due to this rather sizeable hole in the defense, each one of our goals counted for three. Sadly, with this new math I still think we lost.

This could be the first of many tournaments, or perhaps the last, since our pint-sized Hab-for-a-day recently announced that he would rather take up snowboarding than hockey. I guess if that’s what he wants then we’ll be signing him up for lessons. Poor kid, if he thought his parents were baffled by local organized hockey, we are utterly clueless when it comes to snowboarding. Although, I think MAHG might actually be how snowboarders address one-another.

Go Canada