Twenty-Seven Gone and Twenty-Seven Gone.
July 18, 2009, by Homme De Sept-Iles
Dreamt of a hockey player. My afternoon nap. The kind of dream after which one wakes up and isn’t sure if the digital readout on the alarm clock is an AM number … or a PM one.
Those kind of dreams, I like to tell myself, are the ones which are more real. Or more deep. Or somehow they are more likely to have happened in the alternate universe or the multiverse or whatever it is you’ve decided to name that part of the mind or universe that dreams come from. Or that part of the mind or universe where we go to dream.
As much as I make myself think and write about hockey. And as much as I can’t help think and write about my hockey team, I really don’t think about the game very much. There are a lot of minutes in a day. A lot of minutes in an hour.
A minute. Even a minute is a lot of time. A lot can happen in one mind and in one minute. A lot of ground. Fifteen seconds. In fifteen seconds you can imagine; all your ex-lovers, see each face lovingly or hatefully reconstructed, you can imagine each family member in a cooliris kind of way and maybe throw in several bad report card grades, your first pair of skates and your current eating desires. All that in fifteen seconds.
I’m here to tell you that the object of my desire, my raison d’etre in the writing sense, my current subject of choice really doesn’t get much airplay in these fifteen second segments. In these minute-filled days.
During the season, maybe it’s different. I’ll have to run some experiments (comparative) and offer some conclusions.
The dream; Alex Kovalev with his many moves and magic spacing separation; swindling the tourists with his puck opens an embarrassing two lanes in the opponents defensive … the goaltender is miraculously in neither lane … there are small angry pairs of opponents, dancing with the wrong dance partners, with each other; and having lost their respective coverages, with nobody to defend and, to make matters worse they are all also out of position, location-wise on the ice as well. There are only three cleverly triangulated Canadiens, Kovalev at the top of the triangle and closest to the blue line … and Kovalev’s pass to either Hab will result in a free shot and a goal.
He fakes passing in one direction and launches it into a deserted net. The goalie is sliding helplessly toward the right faceoff circle. He is leaving the top-most right corner of his crease. Helpless spaceman adrift.
It’s an easy goal and it’s the kind that leaves the crowd sick with loud, embarrassed ecstasy … it seemed so easy … the sound of the crowd was a five-minutes-left-in-the-game sound … the Bell Central sound a crowd makes when their Montreal team has just scored the third of three unanswered goals in a game that was tight and whose result was belligerently unknowable … til the can slicing … til the first of the three goals. And the second goal. And now this third to end the competitive phase (in John Facenda’s immortalized words).
The crowd weeps in ovation and makes the sound it would when the outcome was somewhat unlikely or not in the Canadiens’ favour.
Plekanec is involved in the goal somehow … and, remember it was a dream, he celebrates it as if he was the one who scored it.
But it’s Kovalev’s goal.
And it’s our loss.
Related posts:
Subscribe to the Podcast
0 comments
Kick things off by filling out the form below.
Leave a Comment