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Posted on Fri, Jan 21, 2011 : 12:11 a.m.

When the lake freezes over

By Mike Ball

This past weekend, Whitmore Lake hosted an organized “Pond Hockey” tournament. Dozens of teams came out, and everyone had a great weekend, especially in the beer tent. All the organization brought a different simpler sort of pond hockey to mind. Here’s a column I wrote a couple of years ago about that:

When my son was a lot younger, I coached his ice hockey teams. This meant that several mornings every week, at about 5 a.m., I would join a bunch of other dads carrying our lifeless little bundles of kid across frozen parking lots and into the rink, stuffing them into miniature hockey pads and skates, then chucking them out on the ice.

Playing hockey on a Zamboni-groomed indoor rink is great for a kid. You always have decent ice, the lines and nets are regulation, and you have those Plexiglas-topped walls to smash into when you want to scare your mom. You have benches where you can sit between shifts and have squirt-fights with the water bottles. And afterward, there’s juice boxes and brownies in the locker room, so you can have a food fight while you’re taking your gear off.

Skating on a frozen lake is different. You have to watch out for cracks, uneven spots, fishing holes and the occasional handle from a jet ski embedded in the ice. If you’re not careful, your puck can disappear into a snow bank, lost until next July when you’ll stub your toe on it sticking out of the sand in the shallows.

For goals you have to use cinder blocks with a 2x4 propped across them, and you have to be sure you remember to hit the brakes before you sail out of the rink and into someone’s fishing shanty. Your nose and cheeks freeze numb, and you have to take a break every now and then to warm your hands and the toes of your skates on the bonfire made from the old dock section that finally broke for good last fall.

And there’s nothing in this world that’s more fun.

For years I kept a rink out in front of our house, investing a few hours each day in grooming and patching my several hundred square feet of hockey heaven. I kept heavy steel snow shovels stuck in the snow bank, and as Lord of the Rink I passed a decree that all were welcome, as long as they were willing to grab a shovel and skate a couple of human Zamboni passes.

So every afternoon the whole neighborhood could tell that the kids were home from school by the sound of shovels scraping along the ice. Then we would listen to the nonstop snick-snick-snick of little hockey skates, the smack-smack-smack of little hockey sticks, and the shouts of little hockey stars, until it was too dark to have any chance of seeing the puck, and all the moms were tired of keeping dinner warm.

For the organized teams I coached, every Sunday was Pond Hockey at Coach’s House. The rules were simple; no refs, no cheap stuff.

One Sunday the team was in the last day of a tournament that involved an early morning qualifying game, with the finals in the evening. After the morning game the kids came out to the lake and skated nonstop until the sun went down. Then they piled into the cars with their heads steaming in the cold air, laughing and chattering right through the ride back into town for the playoff game.

Which they won.

Those kids are grown and scattered all over now, most of them raising families of their own. I don’t have to spend all that time clearing and grooming and patching the ice any more, since there is nobody around to ue it. I’ve given away the big old shovels, and I’m not even sure where my clipboard, my whistle, or my bag of pucks has wandered off to.

This morning I noticed that the neighbors a couple of doors down were out on the lake clearing a little rink. Their little one must be getting just about old enough for his first skates. You know, it’s going to be mighty good to hear that snick-snick-snick again.

Mike Ball is the Erma Bombeck Award-winning author of "What I've Learned So Far..." and the book "What I've Learned So Far... Part I: Bikes, Docks & Slush Nuggets." This column will be in the upcoming book "What I've Learned So Far... Part II: Angels, Chimps and Tater Mitts."