Rubber dream

Though my experience with ice hockey has been short and it is exclusively that of one spectator I followed this year's Stanley Cup playoffs with great interest, and even got tangled up in a FaceBook thread with 3 other people attempting to guess the scores and the winner of each series. I was right quite a few times in my predictions and wrong even more often but the thing is, I watched game 7 of the finals in a state of absolute excitement. The last week of the playoffs I understood the exact meaning of "feeling antsy".

But then it was over; on Friday 12th at 10 pm CDT I got my last taste of hockey for the season, and that was it. Happy for my friend in Pittsburgh I went back home and crawled to bed, and that night, I dreamed of hockey.

I dreamed of a scarred ice, glistening like an eye about to drop a tear, and of a puck gliding and bouncing (puck has to be an onomatopoeia), of skates blades swooshing - but that had a faint echo of when I sharpen my knives against each other, and sticks slapping and whacking - and that sounded pretty much like wood. Of bodies being slammed against the boards with a thump, and of the shrilling whistle of the referee's call bringing it all to a stop only to put into motion again with a new blow of the whistle - I have a longtime rancor for whistling sounds so that might have been a little too important. There were gasps and grunts and indistinct hollering, a sound wall of human voices but not one intelligible word. There was dripping dampness - maybe sweat or maybe water from the rink, and the only thing I noticed of the players' faces were their eyes, like a dog's tracking the fly he's going to crush against a window. There wasn't any jersey or color in my dream. There wasn't any beginning nor any end, neither goals nor teams nor game. Just motion and a whirlwind of noises and glimmering parts and pieces.

I think I dreamed a puck's dream.