After a few weeks off I made my return to the ice rink for a charity hockey tournament over the weekend.  I was filling in for a team that shares a few players with my normal adult league team.  The action started off on Friday night against a team that I’ve played against regularly.  The problem was that normally our team plays in division C, and the team I was playing on for the tournament normally plays in division E.  Take that fact along with a few ringers that our opponents added to their normal team, and it’s easy to see that we didn’t stand a chance.  I was just happy that we managed to get a couple of goals in the 7-2 blowout.

One nice thing is that the team I was playing on was loaded with defensemen, so I was able to actually play offense for once.  I nearly scored one of the goals in our first game, but one of my line-mates got to it first.  However, I was able to add goals in the following two games on Saturday.  Our first game on Saturday was against a team that was more on our same level.  The game was a good one, but in the end it was a 3-1 loss, with one of the goals being an empty-netter in the last-minute of play.  Obviously, our lone goal was one that I scored for us fairly early in the game.  It was a disappointing loss.

We had quite a bit of down time between the first and second games.  Most on the team stuck around for a few cups of free beer and some free brats.  After awhile a handful of the team headed over to one of the guys house to watch some of the NHL action.  I would have hoped that our team would be inspired to win a game after watching the pros.  But as most were rooting for the Blackhawks, I think the Hawks poor performance rubbed off on us.  It was either that or all the beer.  The second game on Saturday night was rather brutal.  I don’t recall the final score, but it wasn’t close.  I did score one of our goals, which I think there were only two.

Saturday evening’s game wasn’t over until midnight.  Unfortunately our poor performance caused us to be scheduled for our last game at 7am on Sunday morning.  In the first three games we always had a solid number of players, perhaps too many as we often filled up three lines.  On Sunday morning we were lucky we could field two lines of skaters.  I was moved back to defense due to the absence of some players, and was hoping I could help to keep the scoring down and finally get a win.  Unfortunately, this game ended the same as all the others.  As this game featured the worst two teams in the tournament, we matched up with them well, but their goalie played amazing.  I’m sure we out-shot our opponents, but they went on to win a rather close one.

Even with the four loss performance it was still a good time and I was glad to be back on the ice.  Summer league starts next week.