I’m not sure there’s a hockey equivalent to three-strikes-and-you’re-out but I may have gotten close to it this past Thursday night at my game. The good guys fell behind 2-0 early to the bad guys and I’m guessing we were a half dozen or more shifts into the game when my line headed out to see if we could put a dent in that deficit. (It was budget week here in the great-white-north so using the word “deficit” seems appropriate).

I kid you not when I tell you I then proceeded to have 3 breakaways in that single shift. On the first, I got a clean rip away that sailed just over the bar. Keep in mind this is success by my standards on several fronts: I didn’t fan on it, it had as much juice behind it as I am able to muster these days and it made a big noise when it hit the glass in behind. You gotta take your joy where you can get it, that’s my motto.

Our forecheck seemed a little leaky on this night (the talking heads on the sports shows would say our “puck retrieval effort” was lacking) so the bad guys headed out of their end quickly with us in pursuit. Lo and behold, and I don’t recall the reason, but the puck turned over around centre and there I was staring at half a sheet of ice with only a goalie ahead of me again. Mind you, I was now running on only a half a tank after having used up some on the just-completed-sprint-and-miss moments earlier.

Sadly, by the time I got to within sniffing distance of their tender, I heard blades behind me on the right (which sounded faster than mine), and I didn’t think I was going to be able to get my right-hand shot off. Alas, being slow enough for someone to catch cuts both bad and good as I suddenly noticed that not only was there a big burly d-man from the opposing side chasing me down but my right winger had caught up too. Options!

I waited until the pursuer reached to impede my shot then I pulled it to my backhand and tried to saucer a short pass over to my Plan B who was on his forehand. The puck got there, not exactly in his wheelhouse perhaps, but close enough to allow for debate about who really missed scoring on this breakaway. (Hint: I had just missed one 18 seconds earlier so I am going to look elsewhere for blame on this one in the name of being a team player.)

Rinse, repeat. Bad guys puck retrieve, turn and head the other way. Things were even foggier by this point as my oxygen reserves were now lower than those fellas in that Houston-we-have-a-problem moment when they too missed their target (the moon) and were trying to get back to somewhere where they could open the windows on the little space capsule to alleviate their oxygen “deficit”. Their destination was earth, mine was the bench. You can see the parallels here I’m sure.

But then, just like that, there I was with the puck on my stick AGAIN at opposing blue line, heading grudgingly towards their net (it was in the opposite direction of our bench) with no one in site AGAIN but their tender. I had a different angle this time, with my bombing run coming in a little more from the east than the west. This was good news indeed because I did have a lane to shoot from as their d-man chased from back-left, and my wingman had apparently been either shot down or aborted the mission to head for the bench.

I shot low left, far side / blocker side this time and banked hard to the right hoping my momentum would carry me all the way back to the bench without having to take a single stride more. Interestingly, and not insignificantly, it occurred to me right then that I had actually missed scoring in the exact same spot about 2 shifts prior on what could also be called a breakaway. On that instance, I got a real good shot away and had it counted but the goalie made what I consider to be a very good save. This time my shot was much weaker but decently placed. It really shouldn’t have gone in but I’m convinced the hockey gods were probably getting tired as well and worried there was a skip in the celestial hockey record and if the tender made the save, it would just come back to me at centre again and well, this repeat-for-all-eternity scenario could actually be a manifestation of hell, right?

So in it went and off I went. As the replacement troops came off our bench, I was heavily chirped for not being gracious enough to score earlier on the 3 pizza’s the opposing side had served up to me.

Weirdly, the game followed this pattern until the end. My aforementioned winger had at least 3 more breakaways himself, and scored on none of them, and the bad guys kept scoring at the other end. We lost 6-2.