Playoff update and WTF

My local rink was unimpressed by the 6-7 inches of snow that fell in our area on Saturday and Sunday so it went forward with our first round of the playoffs that were scheduled for Sunday night. The game was scheduled for 8:15 and I left around 7 to give myself plenty of time to get there. I should have realized that kind of planning ahead only meant trouble, well ok, not trouble per se, but weirdness for sure.
Getting to the rink was not horrible; the local roads were sketchy but passable and the interstate was dry as a bone. I arrived around 7:30 to see two teams who had started their game at 5 still on the ice. Yeah, they were in their third 20 minute overtime. They had played the equivalent of two back to back to back games and were still skating away. Even though they wrapped it up about 15 minutes after I got there it meant that the game that was slotted before our match, the 7:00 game, did not start till 8. You see where I am going with this? Once everything was said and done we didn’t drop the puck until 9. But at least the shenanigans were not for nothing. We put together a good game, I played well and we posting a playoff, shutout, win. The first round was single elimination so that puts us through to the second where we will face the second seed in a best of three series. That’s the good news, the bad news is that it looks like we will have a VERY short bench for the first match of that series. Like 6-8 skaters short. Ouch…
So we have seen the good and the bad, here comes the weird.
So post game, and post game bullshitting in the locker room, I head out to toss my stuff in the car and head home when one of my teammates comes up to me.
“Hey man, can you do me a favor?”
“Sure, what’s up”
“It looks like someone on the other team slit my tires after the game, can you take my girlfriend and her two kids back to my place? I live over by you”
I said sure, but what…the…fuck… It appears that one of the other team, upset after getting into a small donnybrook with one of our players, knifed the tires of what he though was that guys car. Turns out he got the right team but the wrong player.
I want you to reread and digest that. Some pathetic fuck slit the sidewalls of someone’s tires over a minor fracas and defeat in a beer league hockey game…Yeah…

So I took the three of them home while my teammate waited with his car for a tow. The ride home was loud as the kids were wound up and the girlfriend was pissed off. I will summarize the high points with a list.
–There were multiple threats of spankings and multiple occurrences of child sass
–I got called “old man” and accused of “driving crazy”( by the little girls, not the girlfriend)
–The two little girls started messing with my goalie sticks, which I asked them to leave alone. They refused and the ensuing shenanigans, between them, led to one getting busted in the lip hard enough to make it bleed.
–I discovered I had enough napkins in the glove-box comfort her and stop the very minimal bleeding.

In the end everyone got home just fine and I got to call Genie around 11 on my way back to our house.
“Hey, remember how I said it was a good thing that we finally had an early game cause I would be back at a reasonable hour…”

More soon.