Thursday, June 16, 2011

39 Years

Congratulations to the Bruins! Lord Stanley's Cup is back in New England. 39 years? It's about time!

We skated on the swamp pond next to the dump at the end of Mayfield Street, the cemetery ponds down back and even a few times on the large Allen's Avenue pond. We played pickup, just our gang. Skates, sticks and heavy winter sweaters. We never, ever skated indoors. It was unheard of in our part of Maine. Basketball was King! It was years before the Maine Mariners hit the ice at CCCC and brought basketball, in the state during the winter, a little competition putting fannies in the seats. There was an NHL game of the week on Saturday afternoon and that was about it. Oh, and my brother and I had the 'hit' of the neighborhood one Christmas... a hockey game, featuring the six originals from the NHL: the Bruins, Blackhawks(my favorite sweater), Canadians, Maple Leafs, Red Wings and Rangers. Our kitchen table was the hub of activity on many a winter afternoon and evening. SCORE!

8 comments:

  1. it was crazy this morning around the TD garden, but i didnt have my camera... :(

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  2. WooweeeeEEEEE!



    Aloha from Waikiki :)

    Comfort Spiral

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  3. As a kid growing up in pre-television Oklahoma hockey was a sport that I knew about from magazines and the newspaper but had never seen and did not understand. I still have never worn a pair of ice skates. We were deprived of winter sports other than the occasional improvised sled made from cardboard boxes on the rare snow fall that covered the ground with white stuff. Winter was basketball and touch football.

    We lived for baseball, the king of all sports. In 3rd grade our teacher allowed us to listen to part of the World Series on the radio. Then as now it was the Yankees and the Dodgers except that the Dodgers were in Brooklyn. We all cheered for the Yankees because Mickey Mantle played for New York and Mickey was from Commerce Oklahoma, he was one of us.

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  4. I watched every minute of this Stanley Cup final series. It was great and I am thrilled that the Cup returns to Causeway Street after such a long absence.

    I lived next to the town's biggest pond but I was a basketball player. One year, I started begging for a new basketball in October, every day. When Christmas came, no basketball, but I got new skates. I was so disappointed.

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  5. The only puck I know anything about stepped out of a midsummer night's dream.

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  6. Congratulations. The St. Louis Blues were hatched in 1967, the year I arrived here for college, and have never won the cup. I did go to a lot of Rangers games when I was a kid, when they and the Bruins would fight it out for fifth and sixth place in the six team league.

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  7. Other than the grace of the skaters, I never really did understand hockey. Too bad there was so much mayhem in Vancouver after the game.

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