Tuesday Night, Rink Two, 9:40 PM

Six-two. It was six-nil at one stage and we scored two in the third, both of them scrappy, and the second one went in off a defenceman's skate and we celebrated it like a cup final because we are all between thirty-eight and fifty-six years old and we have made our peace.

The ice time is 9:40 on a Tuesday. That is the whole story of Division 4. Nobody is here who has anywhere better to be at 9:40 on a Tuesday, and that is a filter that produces an extremely specific and quite good group of men.

Afterwards we stood in the car park until nearly midnight. Four cars, doors open, one of them running because Dennis's battery is on its last month. Nobody planned it, nobody suggested it, and the conversation was about a fence.

I have played in leagues where the hockey was better. I have not played in one where the car park was better.

Ray is fifty-six and has played goal in this league since it started. He is not quick any more and he knows it, and he has replaced quickness with the thing goalies get after twenty years, which is knowing where it is going before it goes there.

Forty-one shots. That number is not a compliment to Ray; it is an indictment of the five of us in front of him. He stopped thirty-five and three of the six were breakaways where he had no help at all.

Then he sat on the bench in the third period and said sorry about the second one, lads, and every man on that bench told him at once to be quiet.

He does it every week. Twenty years of standing in front of something hard and the reflex that has survived is apologising to the people who let it through. We have not found a way to talk him out of it and we have stopped trying to do it gently.

He came through a friend of Dennis's. Thirty-four, borrowed shins, skates that were his own and clearly old, and the flat statement that he had not played since he was seventeen.

He was on the ice about four minutes before everybody had privately revised that. You cannot hide edges. Whatever he did or did not do between seventeen and thirty-four, somebody taught him properly before he stopped.

The interesting part was what happened next, which is that he spent the entire first period passing. Not hunting a goal, not showing anybody anything — just moving it and finding people, including finding me twice in places I had no business being found in.

By the second period he had our names. By the third he was talking to Ray between whistles. He is coming back next week and I want to record that in Division 4 this is not a given; plenty of good players turn up once, discover the standard, and are never seen again.

He was better than the standard and he came back anyway, which tells you he was not there for the hockey either.