I grew up a mere 120 miles from the Old Red Barn. Had I grown up in Guam, I couldn’t have been farther from hockey. A basketball player in a resolutely football town, I knew nothing about the sport my father affectionately refers to as “watching paint dry.”
Julia’s Hockey Knowledge Pre-April 2013:
Female figure skaters who face personal tragedy or compete in pair skating should enlist a former hockey player in their endeavors.
Wayne Gretzky’s wife ruined hockey by demanding that he leave an extremely cold part of Canada to move to LA so that she could continue to be an actress that no one had heard of before she married the only hockey player I had ever heard of.
Any sport with such low final scores must be really boring, at least compared to basketball.
Canadians, rather than Americans, were more likely to regularly participate in hockey matches.
I dated a guy in college who was missing his left front tooth because of a hockey-related childhood accident. He often left out the replacement tooth. *Sigh*
One of the few Paul Newman movies I hadn’t seen has something to do with hockey. Because of a secret desire to run the table on unsuspecting strangers, I have seen the ones about pool.
Most vegan cookies have the consistency of hockey pucks. (But not these, made at a true DC treasure.)
Ice skates were the same for everybody who skated, whether they were figure skaters or hockey players.
I rarely met people who paid any attention to hockey. The ones I did know, who usually played in punk bands, I liked quite a bit.
DC had a hockey player on its team who was Russian, a bit of a big deal, and had missing teeth.
In fall 2012, certain bars in Chinatown were struggling because of some kind of hockey strike.
And then in April 2013 I saw my first game. It wasn’t at the Verizon Center. It didn’t involve professional players. But, while I watched, I ran into someone I used to know.