How to Put on Hockey Equipment‪.‬

Yu smell the equipment before you see it, the old reek, not just of leather or steel or plastic or blood or melted ice or athletic decline or sweat, sweat, sweat, but a solution in which all the components are overpowered by the strength of what they've become together. As a child, you stored your gear in your house's dark, damp, dank basement, hindering any hope of it drying out until maybe the one-month off-season. The gloves and shoulder pads, the shin guards and elbow pads and skates hung on a pegboard, while the breezers and helmet and bag dangled from a chain your mother looped over the low rafters. The accumulated jerseys from several teams and countless camps hung on a miniature Louisville Slugger, suspended by white ropes. The sticks leaned against the wall, even the broken ones, saved for that time you might fashion a whole coffee table or even a chair from the remains. But you're in college now, you live in a dorm, and you've never built that table or chair, or the later ambition, a bar. Finding a place to store your equipment--because your roommate plays Frisbee and acoustic guitar and doesn't understand such needs--is an annoying difficulty. Finally, you sweet-talk the janitor into letting it pollute a maintenance closet; you can't spread the equipment out properly to dry though because you don't want to push your luck. You've unzipped your bag, that's all, and that's not really satisfactory. The familiar weight as you shoulder the fraying strap--it's as if the years of this mindless hauling have furrowed in your flesh a calloused hollow for just this purpose. You always leave your sticks in the car, already running, warming up. Down a flight of stairs and awkwardly squeezing through three doors, you jog now, hurrying through the biting, elucidating cold of another Minnesota hockey night. Sometimes, you carpool teammates to the rink, but not tonight. There'll be no cramming multiple bags into the trunk, trying and failing several times to push down the hatch before ultimate success, no sharing a back seat with the bag that will not fit, with rude hockey sticks that jab you at every turn. Yes, tonight you ride solo, as you occasionally prefer. But the nocturnal journey to the rink doesn't involve putting on hockey equipment, and so this tutorial will not concern itself with the particulars of driving, of selecting the most perfect, era-defining tunes, of praying your gas line won't freeze, of again realizing this is your only moment of stillness in the social, athletic, and academic rigors of a college day--stillness at sixty miles per hour. During this time, the gear hopefully does nothing but rattle around in the trunk, except that sometimes the fear of absence of one piece is enough to ruin this precious fifteen or twenty minutes of meditation. You try to pass off the fear as irrational (you didn't even lay your equipment out to dry), but you can't shake off the dread that you never actually saw your left skate in the jumble of pads. Did you leave it at the rink the night before? Because all your gear was contained in such a small area, you felt no need for that youthful safety measure of counting it all in the order you'd put it on, or from the skate blades up to the helmet, regardless of order. There's that seldom but memorable nightmare from childhood, of opening your bag on game day, dressing as you would at every practice, and then hitting a lurch, of missing something. Frantically you'd root through the bag, question the practical jokers (very often a fruitful endeavor), and ultimately feel that sinking nervous burn. You'd forgotten a piece of equipment. You'd have to hobble out to the lobby in shame, to your father who'd say, "You didn't have your mind on your business."