The Pain Is Over

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 6^th 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 10^13th 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.