Look, you’ll laugh when I tell you this. I’m aware. Still, I have to write it down: the white wine at Sapphire Ice & Leisure centre in Romford wasn’t very good. Somehow, it tasted both of syrup and vinegar. Before you say or think anything, there is some crucial information I need to add at this stage.
As I’d booked my ticket to the game, a waiver informed me that “ice hockey can be a dangerous sport – please keep your eye on the puck at all times”. If we were to try and rank ourselves as a species, from least to most anxious, I doubt I’d make it to the top six billion.
I’d had to travel for an hour on a Sunday night in the cold and the dark all by myself, to watch something I knew little about, and apparently I was also about to lose a tooth, or maybe get my nose broken. Wouldn’t you have gone for a hideous glass of plonk too, if in my shoes?
I shouldn’t have worried, though. I took my seat, the game started, and I was hooked within seconds. Perhaps unsurprisingly, ice hockey turned out to be the perfect game for this particular attention deficit disorder aficionado. As you may remember, I recently went to watch a basketball game then forgot to actually watch the basketball in front of me.
Nothing of the sort happened in Romford. The pace of ice hockey is such that, if you daydream for even half a second, you’ll entirely lose track of the location of the puck, and the general state of affairs. Like American football, it also stops incredibly frequently. Unlike American football, any break gives way to an unhinged musical interlude.
According to my notes, we got treated to, among others: La Bamba, Cotton Eye Joe, Lizzo’s Juice, Mamma Mia, and Akon’s Lonely – a song I’d not heard in 20 years – all in seven to 18-second segments. It was enough to make you feel completely insane. I loved every moment of it.
It’s hard to describe the sheer intensity of ice hockey in words, as the pace of it defies belief, but there’s something so aggressively compelling about these large, beefy boys crossing the rink with the elegance of a butterfly and the speed of a cheetah on, well, speed. I couldn’t take my eyes off them.
More than that: I took sides. That hadn’t happened in a while. Though I’ve enjoyed writing this column greatly, I’ve often thought of myself as a David Attenborough-like figure, watching from a slight distance and staunchly refusing to get involved. Ice hockey broke that.
The Solway Sharks scored and scored again and was up 3-1 but the Romford Raiders, the home team I was sitting with, managed to score before too long. When they equalised, I screamed and clapped until the palms of my hands stung, before I realised I was doing it. Was it the first time the Essex team had a French woman bellowing “ALLEZ!” in their general direction? I’d probably take that bet.
Jarvis Cocker once sang about the urge to call his mum and explain that he just couldn’t come home as he’d left a part of his brain in a field in Hampshire. I did take the Crossrail train back to London at the end but I did so forlornly, and aware that some of my endorphins would forever be left somewhere opposite the shopping centre in Romford. Apparently that’s what watching a puck fall squarely on a ref’s head does to me. Every day’s a school day, huh?