The NHL hockey season has started, and so I went about asking some random people what their most immediate, vivid association with the game was. These are some of the responses:<\/p>\n

\u201cIn 1986 I lived in Montreal for my first year at university, and I listened to every single Canadiens games on the radio. They weren\u2019t really a great team, but they won the cup that year, largely because of Patrick Roy, who was unbeatable. But my favourite player was Chris Nilan, the goon on the team. Nobody wanted to win more and he would do anything, absolutely anything for the team. And when he was on the ice you knew it was going to be okay. Even if you lost, you still knew it was going to be okay, that somehow you still won. It reassuring, a defiantly optimistic kind of feeling and it gave me confidence, something I probably really needed being away from home for the first time.\u201c<\/p>\n

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\u201cMy wife recently got into hockey and one night a week she would play shinny with a bunch of other women at an outdoor rink. Sometimes I took the dog out to play fetch and watch. I remember how beautiful and quiet it was out there. The acoustics in the winter are so soft and different, almost as if isolated and then put in slow motion. There was nothing but the sound of the game\u2014the blades on the ice, the sticks on the puck and the players breathing, shouting to one another\u2026 The spirit of the games were so gentle and cooperative, too, everybody actually on the same side, sharing with one another something they loved. And I would be there off in the distance, the dog running after the ball, so happy to be bounding through the snow, and it all just felt so pure and lovely. Those moments were poems.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u201cI don\u2019t have any association with it. I never played as a kid because we were too poor, and now, after the car accident, I\u2019m never going to have the chance. I live on the street now. My body\u2019s been ruined, look at this, I\u2019m in constant pain and I can\u2019t work. My shoulder dislocates when I\u2019m sleeping and I wake up screaming. I don\u2019t know if I\u2019m crazy or not, you know? And whadda ya the doctors give me for the pain? Methadone. And you know what it does for me? It makes my dick soft, so no, I don\u2019t think nothing when you say hockey.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u201cWhen I was ten my father would do up my skates before each game. He laced them tighter than I ever could, and it felt like getting tucked into bed, only a kind of opposite. And then after the game he would buy me an Orange Fanta and to this day whenever I have one I am instantly transported back in time, to the smell of that rink and the permanence of my father’s understated love.”<\/p>\n

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