It's that time of the season again. Playoffs started for my spring league last night. We played a pretty solid game. The hockey crowd here is a pretty cool bunch all around. Of course, people are competitive, so this leads to some fun conflict during some of the games.

Last week in our final game before playoffs, we were playing a tight game against the team with one of the fieriest players in the league. It's a non-checking league. What this means by our league's standards is that there is no intentional contact above the waist and that you must play the puck and not the body. Technically hip checking is still legal if you are attempting to play the puck and they tend to give a bit of wiggle room in the upper leagues as to what is considered "intentional" contact above the waist. While playing, the hot head on the other team decided to dump our team's "dumping bag" behind our net.

The "dumping bag" title is an interesting side bar. Our captain is the most vocal person on our team, as he should be. Furthermore, he is the only player that usually speaks to the other teams or the refs about anything. He's not typically a jerk on the "ice" and he doesn't play very physical in the slightest. But for whatever reasons, he rubs a lot of other players the wrong way and they tend to play him overly physical. Thus he gets dumped a lot in games as he receives a lot of hard physical contact, but rarely if ever tries to dish it back.

To continue, our captain gets dumped behind the next in a superb combination of trip and cross-check. This was done by the most physical player on their team, so a response had to be given. It turned out to come up pretty soon after. Playing down by one-goal, the other player picked up a puck near the boards in our zone. I cut off the lane to the net with my stick, placed my body in between him and center rink and really only left him space back up toward the center line along the boards. He switched his puck quickly to my backhand side and instead of retreating back up the board or looking for a quick outlet pass, he decided that he would rather skate toward the center right over me. Seeing as we were now occupying the same lane and he had made his intent quite clear, I knew a collision was inevitable. I planted, poked the puck away and as he skated into me there was an explosion ending with the solid crack of helmet and stick on the ground. I left him in a scattered mess as I skated back up in an attempt to retrieve the blocked puck. It was such a satisfying (and legal) hit that the thought of it still makes me smile. The last thing I hear him yell as he gets up is, "Fine, now we're even!" Good. He got the point.

I am not nearly as proud of myself about what happened last night, but it was a choice I made and I stand by it. Had I to do it over, would I do it the same way? Probably not, but that's fine. We were playing a team that for the past several seasons had been known as being overly physical and hot-headed. This season has been very different. They've been a fun team to play with reasonable physicality. That is except for one player. #23 is a funny type of physical. He plays Hulk-Smash hockey. He just hits everyone and everything. Not because he's angry or super aggressive, it's just all he really knows how to do. He skates, and SMASH. He shoots, then SMASH. So after a pass from the boards at the mid-line he pauses and then suddenly decides that he want's to drop hard to the net. That's fine, if that's your game plan, but there's one thing about this that did not please me. All the leagues in the town I play in are co-ed. Generally when you're a 175-lb man, you're not supposed to hit the 120-lb girls. He apparently doesn't understand that little unwritten rule. So open-ice nowhere near a puck, he decides to crash the net, right over our smallest female forward. I should have handled things slightly different, but I chased him down and cross-checked his face in the rink. The funny thing was when he gets up wondering "what the hell?" because he just got cross-checked by a man his own size, yet he didn't seem to have an issue charging a girl half it. I gave him some choice words and proceeded off the "ice" as the officials needlessly tried to determine what my penalty was. Pick one, I'm going to the box.

It was a good game though. We played very well. I was lucky enough to get to start us off about 1:28 into the game with a loose puck break away the I pasted up in the top netting. Eventually we led our way to a 5 - 1 lead. They picked up another goal in a late power play (not mine) and we held them there until the end. We had great energy, control and aggression. A lot of heads up play and we really looked like a playoff caliber team that game. Next game we get the 1 seed, so that will be our true test, but we beat them the last time we played them in the season and if we play as well as we did last night, it should be a great game.