Semifinal: Rink One, and They Gave Us the Good Rink

Rink one has the good boards, the scoreboard that works, and seating for about two hundred people, of whom nineteen were present.

We have played on rink two for four seasons. Rink two has a soft patch by the far blue line that everybody in the division knows about, a scoreclock stuck on 00:00 since February, and a smell.

The effect of rink one on our side was immediate and completely counterproductive. Everybody took a longer first shift. Two players did a lap before the warm-up who have never done a lap in their lives. Dennis, who has one move, attempted a second move in the third minute and put it into the netting.

We settled around the eight-minute mark, which is roughly when the room stopped being a room we were impressed by and went back to being ice.

Three all with about four minutes left, a scramble at the top of the crease, and a puck that hit Tomas somewhere between the knee and the shin and went in off the post.

He did not see it. He was on the ice by then, facing entirely the wrong way, and the first he knew of any of it was five men arriving on top of him.

He has played every week for four seasons and has one goal, in November 2022, which he also did not see because it went in off his skate.

This is now a documented pattern and the bench has decided it is a technique. He has been instructed to stand in front of the net and turn around, which is exactly the sort of tactical development that keeps a Division Four side together for four years.

The messages fall into three categories and I have counted them, because somebody had to and I am the one with a newspaper.

Eighty-one are about what time to arrive, which is not in dispute and has been answered four times. Sixty-odd are photographs of the bracket. The rest are Dennis.

The one actual decision — whether we ask Wojciech, who played for us in 2023 and moved away and is apparently back — has been raised twice and dropped twice, because everybody wants him and nobody wants to be the person who says out loud that we want him more than we want the man he would replace.

That man reads the chat. That is the whole reason. Four seasons of Tuesday nights and a beer league bracket and we have arrived, unmistakably, at office politics.

Eight partners. Four children, three of whom were on devices throughout and one of whom watched every second and is nine and now wants to play. Two parents, both of Tomas, who have not missed a home fixture in four seasons and who live an hour away.

Two men from the side we beat in the quarterfinal, sitting high up, saying nothing, watching properly. One member of staff who did not have to be in the seats and was.

The other two I do not know. Middle-aged, together, no connection to anybody on either bench that I could identify, and they stayed to the end and left before the handshake.

I put nineteen in the ledger and then wrote the breakdown underneath it, because the number on its own says nothing and the breakdown says that a beer league fixture on a Tuesday pulled two strangers in off the street. That is the part I would like recorded.