bruised

As soon as I got hit I knew that this one would be a good one. The puck came flying out of nowhere, Adam on one of his semi-coordinated wanna-be NHL odd man rushes during that five-minute window before true practice starts, taking a slapshot that whistled in just over my right knee and ricocheted off into the corner. I don't really know where it went precisely, because I was too busy squinching my eyes shut in silent pain. You'd think goalie pads might do their job once in a while, but I guess not.

I checked it while changing afterwards. It had that reddish blanched look that denotes impact, and I fancied I could almost see the ridges on the side of the puck embedded in my thigh. It took two full days for it to really color up, but it was gorgeous when it did. Just in time to show off this weekend during the sketchiest tournament we've ever had.

It was in Syracuse, and we were wrongfooted almost from the start. We'd calculated to get down there about two hours early, which turned out to be a lucky thing since our first game had been rescheduled (unbeknownst to us) to two hours earlier than we thought, as well as being at a totally different rink. Half our team wasn't even there yet though, so as the other half of us were frantically ripping off clothing and throwing on gear in the middle of the rink's public area (there were no locker rooms), our coaches managed to get things reorganized so the teams were shuffled up. Even then we kept hearing conflicting messages - get dressed, we're on right now, get half dressed, we're on next game, don't get dressed, no, get dressed, we're up - eventually it was established that we would be going on at about the same time as we had originally been scheduled for, and so we sat around in our equipment for two hours. The whole no-locker room thing was interesting, as there was some sort of high school football thing going on in the building across the parking lot and random people kept wandering into the rink to see what was going on. What they found was three or four teams' worth of hockey players wandering around in varying stages of undress.

After three games, two of them back-to-back, my knee was throbbing like a drum even though it hadn't sustained another direct hit. Somewhere along the line natural circulation had begun to spread the color as well, so the original puck-sized rectangle had grown four or five times larger and was migrating around my thigh almost to the back of my knee. When we finally got home at 10 last night, I made a beeline for the shower, where I noticed that it had changed color as well, from a spotty green-purple to big blotches of deep red and plum. What's weird is that it isn't just the color that spread either; it hurts all the way around. The red badge of whatever type of courage it is that makes you stand in front of a net to have hard bits of vulcanized rubber impelled at high velocity towards you.