Personal Narrative: It's Been A Ride

It’s Been a Ride As the freshman finished packing the bus with all the gear and all got on the bus we were ready to go. We had a long ride ahead of us as we were heading to Housatonic, a team that we beat 5-3 and tied 3-3 during the regular season. However, they were able to finish up their season strong and were a much better team than before. The bus rides to the games are always a blast. We would have the tunes cranking and we would all be joking around. Coach, a short, angry, little guy didn’t like that we always fooled around, but it worked for us cause we were able to win games. However, this game was a lot bigger than most. Win and move on, lose and your season is over, and in my case my high school career would be over. After a long

The next four days weren’t that bad, we just had practice and continued to focus on the big game ahead of us. Win and move on or lose and go home, and in my case lose and that’s the end of your high school career. It’s a hard concept to grasp, you play for the same team for 4 years earn your spot and then you get to a point where it could be your last game ever. The game took place on March 12th; it was a Thursday at 6:30. I remember waking up for school that day extremely sick with a cold, I know it sounds weak, but it was really bad. As much as I wanted to stay home and spend the day resting, I had to go to school, which was terrible. As soon as I finished class I went straight home and tried to sleep the cold off. After a nice long refreshing nap I packed up my gear and went to the rink where the bus was picking us up. The bus ride was about an hour and a half, a lot of the guys peed in bottles because we got lost and the ride took longer than expected. When we got to the rink we had about an hour before the game started. I did my normal pregame routine and tried not to overthink the fact that we needed to win this game. As it got closer to game time I just had a feeling of excitement and nervousness in me. I knew going into this game it was going to be hard to win, because we were now facing the 3 seed in the

We had a roster that consisted of about 14 skaters and 2 goalies. Westhill, the team that we were playing had less. With such small teams, getting the lead early is always important because stamina plays such a large role later into the game. We were able to score about 5 minutes into the game on a good goal from Ryan Gaidos, his fourth goal of the tournament and in 2 games. It was a beauty of a shot that beat the goalie low to his right side. With about 8 minutes to go into the first period Westhill had a great opportunity to tie the game on a one-timer pass from the corner, but I came in clutch with a beautiful glove save, not to be cocky, it was probably my best save of the year. The game went back and forth for the rest of the first period with no one able to find the back of the net. Westhill had the greater majority of the scoring chances; they were a very strong offensive team. In between periods we went wild, the team dressing rooms were right next to each other. We wanted to make sure that Westhill knew we were ready to keep playing. As the second period started Westhill returned the favor to us by scoring a quick one timer goal from the corner, one that was very similar to glove save I had earlier in the game, but I missed it this time. It was now 1-1 with about 14 minutes to go into the period, not the start that we wanted to the period we managed to keep fighting. After about 6 minutes of