The pond wouldn’t freeze: it’s as simple and dispiriting as that. Organizers of the World Pond Hockey Championships in Plaster Rock, New Brunswick, had no choice but to announce, earlier this month, that the tournament was a no-go for 2024. Co-founder Danny Braun made the call nobody wanted to hear: the winter had been too warm. Without a foot of “good blue ice,” it just wasn’t viable to be hosting 120 teams over four days on 20-odd rinks on Roulston Lake, and by early February, they just didn’t have it. And so the 22^nd edition of these pond playoffs will have to wait until 2025, climate change permitting.

COVID-19 shut down the 2021 edition of the Championships, but other than that, the tournament has been going for 21 years. In 2004, when it was in its third year, I teamed with my friends Mike, Evan, and Nick to mount a Toronto challenge for the big wooden faux Stanley Cup that they award to the victors. We (spoiler alert) weren’t them, but it was a glorious adventure that I wrote about in my 2014 book Puckstruck. Here’s a version of that, in tribute to Danny Braun and the good people of Plaster Rock and the fun we had on their ice when it was good and blue and ice.

We flew to New Brunswick from Toronto, four of us, in a February freeze. Fred from the Tobique Lions Club was waiting for us with his big white van at the airport in Fredericton and once we’d collected our sticks and our gear, we were on the road north for the two-hour drive to Plaster Rock.

I’d heard the organizer of the World Pond Hockey Championships, Danny Braun, talking on the radio about what it was all about: “It’s carving skates, sticks and pucks and laughter,” he said. That sounded like fun, these World Pond Hockey Championships, so I’d signed us up, me and my friends Nick and Mike and Evan, paid the money, made arrangements. I ordered sweaters, red with black and white trim, and a big exclamation mark on the front, to intimidate people who are scared of punctuation. We were in our 30s, veterans all of many men’s-league campaigns in countless bad-smelling rinks across the years, who took the game just seriously enough but no more than that. Nick and Mike and Evan are all, I should say, better hockey players than me and, looking back, maybe I thought that was enough of a winning formula. As it turned out, we probably should have taken the time to practice together, maybe come up with a plan for how to play, some four-on-four strategies. But in the end, no, that’s not what we did.

There are pond-hockey tournaments everywhere now, but the one at Plaster Rock was one of the earliest to organize, and it’s still the most venerable. No-one, yet, has made the journey from Plaster Rock to the NHL. A thousand or so people live there, amid forests and ferns. The local sawmill is the biggest employer in town; the ferns are principally fiddleheads, which are celebrated at their own annual festival. If you didn’t know that Plaster Rock is the fiddlehead capital of Canada, you must have missed the giant fiddlehead statue that guards the town limits.

They dropped a puck out of a helicopter to get the tournament started. We missed that, but Fred got us to town and down to Roulston Lake in time to take the ice for the first of our Friday-night games. Snow was blowing down through the glare of big lights they’d trucked into that oasis in the boreal dark. They had 24 rinks cleared, and there were games underway on most of them when we skated out to face the team from the Moosehead brewery in Saint John’s. The whole lake was hockey, and if you closed your eyes to listen, you could hear it carefully quoting the work of hockey writers from Betsy Struthers (“the shush of skates”) to Peter Gzowski (“the thwock and clack of the puck”) to R.J. Childerhose (“the shoo-oonk! of skate blades as someone stops”).

I may have fallen into a reverie. From an early age, I’ve had a tendency to narrate the game as I’m playing it, a ponderous muttering habit that I’m sure inhibited my development as a player. To me, the need to describe what’s happening on the ice, to find the right words, has always seemed just as important — maybe more so? — as making it happen.

We were down quickly, 3-0. There were no goalies here. The nets were low and wide-mouthed, a mailbox for posting pucks. All this way we’d come without any real thought of how we wanted to play, or what the conditions might demand. We were slow and bunched-up: the word for us was glacial. We tried to learn from the beer-making boys as they were whomping us, but it was hard to learn lessons and be losing both at the same time. The game went fast. I was trying to think of the right word to describe Nick’s dogged checking when the game ended. Terrier … ish?

Lacking vocabulary and goals, we lost 15-6.

Next game, we tried sending Mike forward on his own while the rest of us stayed back. That worked for a while: Mike poached some goals and we took the lead. Then we got tired, and maybe nervous — it was a hometown team we were up against, with lots of fans by the snowbank. New plan: one man back, everybody else to the attack. That worked to the extent that we only lost that game 14-6. We ate our suppers with our skates on, sitting on hay bales, in the big rinkside tent, where the beer was.

Firemen flooded the rinks with the town truck while we slept Friday night. Saturday morning we sat on our hastily made beds in the suite at the Settler’s Inn & Motel, taped our sticks, tied our skates, and when the time came we clomped through the snow into the woods to find the firemen were back out, giving the ice a final spritz with potato sprayers. It was, we were all agreed, fucking cold: there was a sense that just by showing up you were consenting to a cryogenic future.

In the brisk and the bright we played a team with a mixed Montreal/Cornerbrook lineage and managed to tie them, the Quebec Newfoundlanders, 19-19. Then we started to win. Squaloid might be the word for the way Nick was hunting the puck — it’s a good hockey word, anyway, right up there with temerarious, which describes Evan’s burst of enthusiasm in the final few minutes. Mike just scored, with swagger. I remained semi-glaciated, for my part, but with a nagging persistence in my checking that irked our rivals into making mistakes with a helpful consistency. We were finding our adjectives, now, and we used them to beat another Plaster Rock team, 14-6, followed by a faculty of teachers from Oakville 18-7.

At the tournament dance that night, at the high school, we didn’t dance so much as limp around the lockers-lined corridor nursing our Mooseheads until we were surprised by the news that we’d made the playoffs. It was hard-to-believe and happy news, though we were too sore to do more than nod before we took our aches back to the Settler’s Inn.

Sunday morning when we woke up it was minus-WTF in the woods outdoors: the thermometer made Saturday’s cold seem like a joke. We had to keep checking to see if our hands were still there in our hockey gloves, because we couldn’t feel them. The players on the team from Washington weren’t just young and just fast, they were serious (and young, and fast). The Frozen Four, they were called. No fooling around with these guys. They made our makeshift attack look like a game for clowns. They had different plans, at least four of them, all elegant and effective, which they switched up with subtle nods. A small dense mass of extra-cold had settled into the slot in front of our net, a micro-climate that we may have briefly hoped might re-inforce our defensive structure, but it didn’t faze the Americans. They were good guys, I have to say, even as they went on smoking us — 21-7 was the final score — and we were pleased for them.

Skates off, boots on, we stood by to watch them play in the semi-final later that polar afternoon, against an even younger, faster, quicker-nodding team from Boston called the Danglers, who edged them by a score of 18-17. In the final, the Danglers (all of whom were, in fact, Canadians) took on the Pepsi Vipers, locally favoured because their captain had once lived in Plaster Rock. Didn’t matter: it was the Danglers who zoomed to a 24-7 victory.

I don’t know that we were as happy, heading for home, as those Danglers, but we were pretty happy. We’d travelled the land to skate on a big New Brunswick lake where, in a forest, blurred by snow, we were as cold as we’d ever been for three days of mostly losing and very little winning. We were still thawing on the flight home to Toronto, and still aching. If there were lessons we’d learned, what were they? It was hard to remember. But we’d been happy the whole time, laughing as we went, win or lose, feeling lucky. Maybe there are actual words for the joy you generate on skates, with a stick in your hand, while trying to corral a puck, among friends, but then again maybe it’s only a feeling you have to try to hold on to.

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Pond Hockey Championship co-founder and tournament director Danny Braun in February of 2006.