Five hours to ice time

When I was nine years old, I remember seeing a hockey game late at night on cable TV and thinking it looked kinda cool.  The next day was the scholastic book fair, and I saw a book with a picture of a hockey player on the front. Flipping through, it was a biography of Wayne Gretzky, the greatest hockey player of all time. It turned out he and I had the same birthday.  That meant it was fate: I had to become a hockey player.

I played a lot of street hockey as a kid, but my dreams of playing professionally ended when I found out a year or two later that 5-7 was almost always too short for the NHL and generally hockey players were exceptional athletes. But my fandom stayed with me. The name of this blog is a reference to me putting myself in the Create-A-Player for EA Sports NHL '94 for Sega Genesis, always wearing jersey number 61 (a reverse of my favorite player, Brett Hull).  I listened to the Roenick-era Blackhawks on the radio every game. When I was in my early 20s, I moved from Illinois to North Dakota to take a prep sportswriting job just to get a chance to cover high-school hockey.  I lived through the lean years of the Blackhawks, the Jocelyn Thibault and Arnason-Bell-Calder lines, and loved them every step of the way.  And yes, it's been pretty sweet to see them win three Stanley Cups.  My son, born the August before their first, is named Patrick Jonathan after their two best players.

But there's one thing I've never actually done: Lace up a pair of skates and hit the ice.

I'm in Orange County, California, now, and there are some opportunities here that I haven't seen before. So I'm going to become a hockey player, and I'm using this blog to keep track of it.  I signed up for an 8-week Adult's Intro to Hockey Skating class at The Rinks of Anaheim, and the first class is tonight.  The follow-up to that class is an eight-week hockey skills class, and then you are allegedly ready to play in their introductory rec league. My ultimate goal is to become an acceptable rec-level player, able to play in the regular rec leagues without being an embarrassment or drag on the team.  No. 61 is stepping out of the video games and into real life.