The Ice Was Always There

Watching the USA vs. Canada gold medal game on Sunday brought me down memory lane.

Big games do that. The pace. The nerves. The sound of skates cutting hard into ice. You don’t just watch. You remember.

My earliest memories are cold. Not in a lonely way. In a Minnesota way.

I can still smell my dad’s coat. Gas and motor oil. He wore the same jacket to the rink that he wore snowmobiling with my uncles in the corn fields of western Minnesota. When he wrapped an arm around me in the warming house, that smell meant winter. It meant hockey.

My mom yelled at the refs. Loudly. My dad coached me from age six to ten. He believed in conditioning. “Conditioning beats talent,” he’d say, and then we would skate line to line until our legs burned. I didn’t always love it then. I understand it now.

After games at the old White Bear Lake Hippodrome, we shoveled the ice ourselves. Players and dads scraping and clearing while the men walked carefully in their Sorel boots. No Zamboni waiting. No hot water flooding the surface. Just shovels, cold air, and the quiet pride of taking care of your own rink. Instant hot chocolate in Styrofoam cups afterward.

Powder. Hot water from a metal dispenser. Earned.

Before I ever laced skates, I remember watching the Minnesota Fighting Saints at the old Saint Paul Civic Center. Later, I was seven years old at the Met Center watching the Soviets dominate in February 1980. They looked invincible that night. Two weeks later, they would lose at the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid. Even as a kid, you could feel how much that moment mattered.

I started playing mite hockey at three in Maplewood. My first travel game as a pee wee ended in a 6–0 loss. I still remember the sting of that one. Later that season, I fed a perfect pass from the corner into the high slot. Our center went top shelf over the blocker. An assist, not a goal. I can see it clearly.

I also can’t think of that play without thinking about how he died by suicide years later.

Hockey carries joy and grief on the same sheet of ice.

In high school, I broke my back on the way to the Minnesota State Tournament. My senior year, our varsity team won the consolation championship. I watched from the stands. Sometimes you play. Sometimes you observe. Either way, you are part of it.

In college, I did radio and television play-by-play at Bemidji State University, learning how to describe the speed and rhythm of the game from above the ice. I later played one season of club hockey at University of Wisconsin–Oshkosh. Then I began what became a thirty-year officiating career.

Youth hockey. High school. NCAA Division III in Wisconsin. Arizona. New York. Multiple USA Hockey National Championships along the way.

As a referee, I learned something that applies far beyond the rink: there are official rules and unofficial rules. Knowing when to apply each set matters. Context matters. Judgment matters.

After COVID, when I returned to the ice, coaches and players told me I was better. More patient. More aware. Maybe experience does that. Maybe surviving things does, maybe being authentic does that.

During the pandemic, my family and I watched “Miracle” together. As the game unfolded, I realized something simple and profound: hockey has been the through line of my life. Childhood. Injury. Broadcasting. Officiating. Parenthood. Loss. Reinvention.

In October 2023, I took a puck off the helmet at high speed. The concussion that followed lingered longer than I expected. For the first time in thirty years, I had to step away from officiating.

That was harder than I anticipated.

But even when I wasn’t on the ice, hockey was still there. It always has been.

Over time, the game has taught me something simple and lasting. Hockey is the individual working inside a team environment for a common goal. You bring your strengths, your flaws, your effort, and you commit to something bigger than yourself. That lesson carries into every part of my life now, well beyond the rink.

Hockey connects me to my dad. It connects me to my child. It connects me to the people I love now.

The rink lights are still bright. The boards still rattle. The red line is still there.

And through every version of me, the ice was always there.