Loyal, faithful readers, at the beginning of this term, we promised you victory at all costs. We promised to try harder, to work out more, to eat better and to live for our sports. Well, we all make stupid promises at the beginning of term, and as many of you know from the miniscule amount of work you did this weekend, sometimes those promises are hard to keep. We regret nothing. We had a great Carnival. No apologies.
We will, however, concede that we have made some mistakes as the self-proclaimed heirs to the Rec League Legends throne (all Carnival jokes aside ... but a snow dragon, really?). In the fall, as you checked off the sports teams that we played, you probably noticed that we missed a few big names.
One of those was the football team. Truth be told, that was pretty intentional because getting hit by Bronson Green ’14 or run over by Dominick Pierre ’14 doesn’t seem that appealing to anyone, especially the Princeton team.
The other was soccer. True, we could have been worked equally as badly, but we probably wouldn’t have sustained the same injuries.
Also, you have probably noticed that we haven’t played the best winter sport in the history of winter sports: hockey. So being the crafty seniors that we are, we worked smarter, not harder, and combined the two without our opponents even knowing.
For those of you who don’t know, there is a Facebook group dedicated to the sole pursuit of pond hockey. It’s pretty exclusive for an open group, and it’s probably abused less than your class’s page, where people who don’t go here or that I have never seen in my entire life post incessantly about who knows what. Regardless, the group is a hot commodity and it facilitates some pretty intense tilts. We threw out the bait: “Pond hockey at 3:30.” The trap practically set itself.
The idea behind the ingenious plan was simple: we didn’t have a competitor late in the game, we wanted to play pond hockey and it was honestly a complete accident. Poor planning, perfect execution. The soccer team rolled up to Occom and we were ready.
Preparation: Same as pretty much every week. Eat whatever we want, drink a double protein shake after lugging a backpack around all day, get a minimum of 10 hours of sleep a night and read as much ESPN, Grantland and BleacherReport as is humanly possible while still maintaining our academics. Plus, I have played hockey since the age of 7 in hotbeds like Charleston, S.C., which many of you know to be the home of the South Carolina Stingrays, and Louisville, Ky., which the rest of you know to be the city that’s, like, three hours away from the Nashville Predators. We. Could. Not. Lose.
Once we found ourselves in this situation, we realized that the game should practically win itself. Soccer, from what I am told by those who can play it, is what experts call a foot-intensive sport. Hockey, however, consists of a lot of hands, skating and, of course, great hair. We figured the combination was definitely, sort of, in our favor.
Unfortunately, as has often been the case over our two-term stint that allegedly doesn’t actually count for PE credit, we were not 100 percent correct. Though some members of the soccer team aren’t fantastic on ice, some have apparently been playing their entire lives in places with frozen ponds in backyards.
We started playing pick-up with some honorary Legends that showed up and wanted to play on our team. Their foot skills were all there, which didn’t exactly make a difference in a sport with sticks, but a few of them had some nasty moves. I will spare you the game’s gory details and just sum it up with the fact that Gabe Hoffman-Johnson ’14 dangled me so badly at one point that there was nothing to do but sit down and think about things for a while.
That being said, we put up some big numbers over the course of the afternoon and definitely held our own. As is tradition with pond hockey, we didn’t actually keep score — you can’t be the dude who tries too hard on a fun day at the pond. It’s not a good look for anyone. However, with that in mind, we refuse to actually call this a loss. A win? Questionable. A tie? Probable.
So we have some work to do before we get that stellar record where we need it to be. We remain optimistic about next week’s men’s basketball challenge. I think the Vegas spread is Legends down 77 points in a 15-minute competition. Don’t take the over again, Mom.
