How to Take off Goalie Equipment (Short Story‪)‬

Goaltenders are another matter altogether. Your equipment doesn't just weigh more that a forward's--it costs more. Much, much more. Maybe that's why Dad initially resisted your adamancy, as a second year squirt, to move back to the goal. True: you weren't very good. True: hockey moms would glare violently at him every time you let in a weak one. Truest: the equipment costs thousands of dollars, and it doesn't last forever. As much as you dreamt of an immediate sponsorship by a major equipment manufacturer, of complete uniformity in brand name and color, back then you accumulated your armor gradually, from a Frankensteinian array of sources. You stayed in the junior price range as long as possible, grudgingly accepted hand-me-downs, and borrowed ratty Coopers from the hockey club, patches sewn atop patches. Even as you grew older and did yard work for neighbors and eventually got a job loading sod to help pay your half, you never really achieved the thrill of having everything match. Your pads wore out in phases--your glove one year, your blocker and helmet the next--never all at the same time. And, let's be honest, the gear was why you chose this strange position in the first place. That's one unequivocal truth for goaltenders; anyone who claims otherwise is a liar. Those first pieces of equipment that so enraptured you, that flipped some demented switch in your brain: the once-seen, bizarrely anonymous UIC goalie's blue and yellow Lefebvres, the first blocker you ever tried on with an angled surface (doubtless the old Heaton Wave), maybe Curtis Joseph's "Cujo" mask ... No, it was a glove. Namely, the pocket. Was it the novelty of a name like The Hook, the abysmal depth of the Vaughn Vision, the split-pocket design of the Cooper Reactor 5, or some flashy graphic like Koho's Felix "The Cat" Potvin line? When you finally got a mitt of your own, you'd wear it around the house, sleep with it, break it in playing with stick blades and tape balls, almost not wanting to use it on the ice, to kick-off its gradual transformation into a smelly, sweat-soaked, history-heavy thing.