We had Sauk Prairie Ice Arena all to ourselves on Christmas Eve Eve!
A longtime friend of our family played in the WIAA State Girls Hockey Tournament with the Superior Spartans in the early spring of 2023. Emmy watched a few of those games and developed an interest in the sport through her relationship with a real live hockey player. In the subsequent couple of years she sequenced through hockey toys, hockey school, and now into the Verona Wildcats 8U youth program.
The youth hockey experience is equal parts fun and frustration (if you’re lucky.) Your feet don’t always know how to get you to where you want to go. You play a few games without scoring a goal. Somebody trips you. Somebody gets mad at you because they think you tripped them. Pressure builds, the “fun” part can be obscured.
In the interest of leaving the growing pains behind for a while and enjoying the skills we’ve developed so far, our family decided to rent some ice around Christmas and use it to do whatever we wanted to do.
We mostly skated around in circles. We took out some pucks and a couple of nets to showcase our shooting skills. We grabbed a cone or two to demonstrate our moves. Caelynn and Kinsley pushed skate trainers around to break in their new completely legitimate Disney ice skates. We all did very impressive things and we had so much fun doing them!
I don’t know where Emmy’s hockey future will take her. It’s too soon to know whether it’s a one-and-done curiosity or if she’ll stick with it past this first season. She shows inklings in each direction. What I do know is that being adjacent to her hockey story has rewritten the closing chapter of mine to be far more rewarding than it otherwise would have been.
Prior to Emmy showing interest in the sport, I hadn’t played since I broke my leg in January of 2013. I skated once the following winter, to prove to myself that I could still do it, but quickly thereafter I hung up my skates, sold my equipment, and didn’t expect I’d ever look back. Something that started when I was seven years old and stuck with me, off and on, for three decades, had vanished overnight and I hadn’t thought much about it.
Seeing Emmy’s burgeoning interest a decade later made me feel like what little skill I still have–what little skill I ever had–might come in handy some day. I found a group of hockey parents who play once a week at the arena near my house. I skated with them once at the tail end of the 2022-2023 season. I enjoyed it. I skated with them again for the full 2023-2024 season. Enjoyed it again. Now I’m about halfway through the 2024-2025 season and still enjoying it. All thanks to Emmy.
Now I’ve even had a chance to skate with Emmy! What was once a thirty year line ending in an inglorious thud is now a forty year circle joining back to the beginning of Emmy’s experience–in hockey, in life, whatever it ends up being. I’m with her for the duration.
Hopefully I can improve Emmy’s experience the way she’s already improved mine. It all feels so much better this way.
Appendices
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