Strawberry Possum

Strawberry Possum

Game Report October 19, 2006

It was not lost on The Strawb’s management that the team’s overwhelming victory of Monday last could result in an unrequested slotting into the Canadore NHL, the higher and more vulgar of the College’s intramural leagues. While the Strawbs love a good hockey game, they equally loathe having to toil so hard on the frozen pond that there remains insufficient energy for the proper performance of strenuous post game activities. Consequently, without great fanfare, the team huddled down into its newest game strategy, the Strawberry Possum.

As the Strawbs ripen to a beautiful lusciousness on the inevitable road to imagined glory and comfortable senescence, their opponents remain mired in a post-pubescent storm of overactive hormones. They tend to skate too swiftly, shoot too hard and whine too much about getting beaten by a bunch of “dastardly old men without scruples”, to quote an unnamed source. In a word, Strawbs’ opponents are too competitive, and thus miss out on much of the beauty of a game characterized by the subtle pass, the whisper of a well tuned blade carving the surface of a newly laid veneer of frozen water and the quiet, heroic moan of a stalwart defenceman as he shakes off a courageously engineered but ill-advised shot to the nuts.

Oh no, Constant Reader, the Strawbs are not a team to be suckered into hyper competitiveness. What is sought is more akin to a religious experience on ice, where the mysteries of karmic existence are perfectly in tune with the game itself. The Strawbs’ philosophy has always been “play as hard as you can without really hurting yourself cause we got some socializin’ to do after the game.” With this philosophy in mind, the Strawberries deliberately cobbled together a very good game against Hank’s Ice Men on Thursday night, purposely losing by a score by 7-4. The manufactured loss will allow the team to claim its rightful place in the Canadore OHL, where it will be free to pursue its goals of near-hockey excellence, competitiveness appropriate to the circumstances, and karmic harmony with universe.

One Strawberry did manage to take the new Possum strategy to an unrequired level. Let’s chalk it up to his quixotic quest for perfection or better still, gross stupidity. Yes, you have correctly guessed who it was. The orange-socked defencemen, still reeling from the vapors, thought it would be a good idea, at game’s end, to soften up one of the referees by pointing out that the game would be better served in future if said referee would “engage in intercourse elsewhere”, or words to that effect. The rash suggestion has resulted in the fact that the Strawbs will have to play the next two games without the services of one its top 10 rearguards. The first round next week will be on him.

Oh ya.. The Vice Ice turned 52, but played a lot older on Strawberry Possum Night. He knows the meaning of subtle strategy execution.

3 Jugs, 5 Guinness, 1 Bud, and an uncounted yet deadly number of Tequila shots were consumed. The Vice Ice may have thrown up in the cab on the ride home.