Game Report
Killer Strawberries
3 Rams 4
March 7, 2013
It was a rather fitting end to a season with little passion.
The Strawbs were eliminated last night from playoff contention after putting up
a good fight against the Rams, a team against which it was well matched.
The Strawbs finished the year with a .500 record, which put
them in 6th place in a 10 team division. It was a season of injuries
for a squad with over 600 years of life experience and over 500 years of hockey
experience, most of this spottled experience thankfully filed away in memory’s
vault of impossible recollection.
This year, if you weren’t injured, you were the exception.
For the 1013th time in his illustrious career, Dr
Phelonius Thug sustained a season ending concussion. Of course, it was
off-ice, he having run into his own car door after too long a session in the
company Dr. Laphroaig, his medication of habit. Dr. Bonehead Butcher, who put
together an impressive streak of “three penalties and you’re out”, was
constantly plagued with bi-shoulder injuries, bad knees and questionable on-ice
judgment. The Vice showed up almost every game, beset by rotator cuff woes and,
most recently, with an alleged concussion he claims to have picked up from
sharing medication with Dr. Thug during some unspecified wellness retreat on
his back porch.
The Ice Martian missed half the games with a terrible case
of untreated hypertension. IMW attributed his condition to his kids, his dog,
his wife, his neighbours, his friends, his financial advisor, his sleep
diagnostician and poor goaltending, in that order. Sir Gumbington Pettigrew
III, aka Gawdawful Gumby or, more simply, Gawd, was hobbled from November
onward with what his psychiatrist described “Anomie Hockeyus Severe-us”. While
the symptoms were many and varied, the most noticeable of them was the one
where he would pass the puck up the middle through his own end, as he peewee
coach screamed in his head “don’t do that, you prepubescent putz!”. On top of
that, the Gumster had a never ending head cold, picked up at the Brass Rail
over the Christmas holidays. Rumours abound that that was not the only thing he
picked up there.
MagBoy was never himself, much to the delight of his main
squeeze, the indomitable MagGirl, yet a true disappointment to his team. It was
not his fault. He laboured for months with a post-genital hernia which slowed
down both his infamous whilybirding and his thought processing.
Shiny Sean Brightly, principal at Our Lady of Perpetual
Nagging and a Packers fan, had the best season of all Strawbs, health-wise. He
managed to finish out the season in the best shape of his life physically.
Mentally, he was a mess. He had to resort to having his son, C., age 5, tie his
skates for him before he left home, lest he forget to do them up in the
dressing room before each game.
Mayor Maynot, the fastest skater ever to don the Strawbs’
colours, was also plagued with a disease of the mind. As the season progressed,
he increasingly hung around the opposition’s blue line, screaming for the puck,
and refusing to enter his defensive zone. It got so bad, he started to do this
during every pre-game warm up. He did not make a pass since November 22, 2012.
Slickery led the team in goals for and against. Near the
end, he physically resembled the bulbous Ice Martian, something he vowed would
never happen. His wife has enrolled him in Weight Watchers, Herbal Magic, Yoga
and Dr. Oz’s Online Forum For Guys Who Now Look Like Their Fathers.
And what the hell was going on with Warrin’ Peace. Here is a
fellow who doesn’t smoke, doesn’t drink, works out 16 times a day and trains
others to be Olympic athletes. Early in the season, he must have pulled
something in the bathroom or elsewhere in a dark corner. He brought to each
game the same amount of energy and elan that a 90 year hooker brings to her
old-age home’s Talent Night.
Freight train Laronde missed more than half the season with
what he termed “an acute, season-ending, laceratory, hyper-contusionary,
fracture of the fifth left-medial metatarsus.” In addition to spending too much
time reading his daughter’s medical school texts in search of the juicy parts,
wethinks he may have taken one too many pucks to the pre-frontal occipital
lobus minimus.
Pyjama Man did even get out the gate in October, the victim of
an off-season plumbing repair mishap. The team hopes he will be shooting better
next year.
Which brings us to the biggest injury of all, a
psychological injury which ensured that the Strawbs would be mired the whole
season languishing in a state of unaccustomed mediocrity. When he was drafted
in 2010, the Marquis DeSap came highly recommended by his mother. The scouting
crew were impressed which his high school hockey credentials and his scathing
dressing room wit. His first 2 seasons with the Strawbs were superb. Night
after night he stole games away from a frustrated opposition. But in the
2012-2013 season, something happened to
the grey matter ensconced between his rather large ears. The Marquis began to resemble,
in MagBoy’s immortal words, “a thin slice of Swiss cheese standing helpless on
the goal line”. There were evenings when he couldn’t stop a beach ball with a
butterfly net. He began to wear industrial strength sunblock to shade his
exposed neck region from the red light behind his net. The quality of his
dressing room banter descended to depths frequently seen in the final hours of
a Gumbytown soiree. In short, he wrote his own ticket to Buttface, Alaska,
home to the Strawbs’ farm team’s farm team, the Nasty Cupcakes. Perhaps, he will
show up ready next year.
All in all it was good year.
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