Last Minute of Play in This Period

A Meditation on the Spiritual Meaning of "Opus" by Eric Prydz

In order for what follows to make any sense at all, I'm going to need you to listen to this song first.

Or maybe as you read along, that would be ok too. “Opus” by Eric Prydz is a meticulous and engrossing piece of electronic dance music, not the sort of thing I would probably have encountered in my life except for the influence of a niche Canadian television show about semi-pro hockey. But it's going to be central thread that's going to pull us through this whole meandering meditation. Are you listening?

Hockey began for me as a four-year old in a tiny Fairport, NY apartment. Dad worked at Xerox and would come home from the office to play floor hockey with me, flicking a plastic coaster around the dark brown carpet in our living room. My earliest memories connect hockey and my father, like it was a mystic ritual that he only shared with a secret society composed of his sons. You have to understand, Dad never played hockey in any capacity. We didn't have cable at the time and I don't remember a single season growing up that Dad seriously followed. None of us boys ever played organized hockey either; a 1995 move to New Mexico made it implausible, and the costs associated made it impossible for a single-income family.

I really can't remember exactly when he taught us all the ephemera and snatches of vernacular that he did. Hockey was just always there. Pretty soon I graduated from the floor to the street. Dad bought a tiny stick with a plastic blade for me and my brother to share, and invested in a real composite wood stick for himself. We flicked around a roller puck in the empty parking lot spaces. Forehand and backhand and deke, wrist shots and slapshots. He even taught us his favorite celly, the Pumpernickel, an elaborate gesture involving a simultaneous fist pump and leg kick designed to really let the opposing squad know you were demonstrating your superiority. I don’t remember where it came from but I distinctly recall the four-color illustrations of an old boys’ book about the sport, intended to provide a smattering of the rules and explain basic techniques. I pored over it, memorizing the referee's penalty signals like an arcane thieves’ cant. Boarding and interference and elbowing and roughing. Icing and offsides and the now-obsolete Two Line Pass, whatever those meant. A world that meant something to my dad, and so it meant even more to me.

In the way of most cornerstone childhood memories, I’m sure that if I could review the tape of my first eighteen years hockey would play a miniscule part in terms of minutes. For all I know, Dad passed that roller puck around with us a couple times during those Fairport years, a couple more on the concrete pad beside our house in New Mexico. Maybe it was more, maybe it wasn’t. I only remember that it happened.

The first notes of the song drag out repetitively until they almost frustrate you. Four notes repeated, monotonous, metronymic. Ba da, da dum. Up one step and back down. A synthesized countup that never seems to move quite fast enough. It takes a while but the pace builds by just one step, and stays there. Then another. The tension stretches as the rhythm remains unbroken. Just four notes. Ba da, da dum.

I’m a pretty public proponent of the axiom that “all truth is God's truth.” That's the only reason even discussing Shoresy here makes sense to me. When I stumbled across the show, the first season had made its way south of the Canadian border, and my life felt distinctly stuck. I was married to the love of my life, I had beautiful children, and that was about it. A dream job was slowly turning into a nightmare. The goals of my twenties were turning into the albatrosses of my early thirties. I hadn't done much that wasn't bare minimum required of me in years. I wondered a lot about how good of a husband and dad I really was, once you filed off the niceness and the simple fact of my presence. If I was the kind of person who allowed myself to think about depression, I would have been depressed.

It's not exactly a situation for which I'd prescribe gritty, raunchy international TV about minor league sports. But God works mysteriously. The first season of Shoresy put me on notice. Have you ever had your life rewritten in a way that is so profoundly stupid, so embarrassing, that you hesitate to share it with others? The first season of Shoresy made me laugh at myself. A shockingly profane senior hockey player tries to stave off his team's imminent demise by teaching them the power of hating to lose. The show spent that first season constantly walking right up to the line of ironically dismissing its’ own premise. Then everything would stop dead to let the audience linger, totally earnest, really and truly hoping for this ragtag crew of degenerates to find something new inside themselves.

The beat begins to pick up tension. Every few repeated four-note measures you can feel the tempo stutter forward, awkward at first, unresolved. Ba da, da dum. The song is in less of a hurry than you are. Every ratcheting metronymic move of that four-note mantra up and down the scale begins to build a story, an arrow pointing. The measures group themselves into repeated bars, each new configuration slightly different than the last, slightly accelerated. Ba da, da dum. Get ready.

Dad took me on a business trip to Dallas when I was about ten. He needed to meet with a supplier, some adult ritual of the world that he entered and left each day at 8 and 6 respectively like clockwork. But since dad had carved his own corner of that world, risking himself on a bet that took us across the country from Rochester to Albuquerque, he had gained the freedom to do things like bring me along. And get us tickets to watch the Stars play the Panthers just a few rows back from the glass. I don’t remember whether we drove or flew across the massive expanse of desert that separates the adjacent states. We just appear in my memories, walking through the rain-soaked pathways between the DFW triangle's stubby skyscrapers. Somehow I also remember that our seats were about $80 apiece, which as a father two decades removed from my Dad carries new and inflated meaning.

Dad and I watched the Stars lose and ate overpriced snacks. I remember feeling the dry chill inside the rink at first, until the pure exhilaration took over. It was probably my first live hockey game, and I drank it in. We shared a few hours, Dad teaching me to cheer for our team to “light the lamp,” me surprised to discover that baying for fighters like gladiators of old was perfectly acceptable behavior if they wore skates. Then we somehow arrived back at our hotel in dreamlike travel, floating through the memory-shrouded mists of Dallas.

Shoresy doesn’t ever give you enough. Six-episode seasons at twenty minutes apiece. You always wonder how the writers will manage to tell any sort of meaningful story. Especially when the first few episodes of a season always seem to linger on all the wrong beats, spending whole minutes frivolously dragging nonsensical jokes to their illogical ends. There's never enough time. But then they do the magic trick. Every premise from the first few episodes is paid off with stunning emotional depth that cashes in each wasteful moment of character development. Everything matters. And we only have a few hours.

I watched the Sudbury Bulldogs pull their sorry franchise back from the brink and then run a record-breaking season winning streak while my life started to shift uncomfortably. Season Two ended and then everything blew up. Solid laptop job jerked away just weeks before Christmas. Grinding multiple gigs while the kids got bigger and my temper got shorter. I could feel it all slipping away, the perfect life I thought it had been up to me to build. Tired and exasperated, sometimes my truly unbelievable Godsent wife and I would look at each other and say “this team will never lose again.” I told it to friends going through hell and repeated it like a prayer while our church went through one setback after another. I spat it into the wind and waited for God to answer. I felt like He was running out of time.

Now each bar adds elements and instruments to the mix. Faster and faster, plodding to stumbling to galloping. A breathless riot of sound that celebrates wildly without ever quite getting its feet underneath itself. Where are we going? Did you hear that? Every ratcheted shift in tempo and orchestration bringing new challenges. Keep up.

Most of the things you learn from your father are silent lessons, and many of those don’t fully make sense until years after the fact. It never seemed odd that Dad occasionally peppered his vernacular with out of date Canadian sports slang, it was just a part of him. Dad hadn’t allowed very much of his old life to survive into his thirties, carefully pruning away the dead wood and bad memories. But hockey never left. He never once sat me down and said, “Now Zack, hockey is about brotherhood and tenacity and hard work and aggression, that’s what I want you to learn. Keep your head up, defend your teammates, and do something you’ll be proud of.” I don't think I learned what he saw in it fully until I found myself in his place, my own first period over, trying to scramble for the bouncing puck of my life as it caromed off the boards. You start to remember little things, later on, when they really matter. Like how, when dad wanted to remind us that life was short, he’d intone “Last minute of play in this period” as if he could still hear it echoing through the old Rochester Americans barn.

I never realized how hard he was working that decade until I reached the same one myself. He had to dig deep to find that extra gear. He wanted it bad enough to do what it took. He played tired, played hurt. He hated to lose.

Season Three was the one that changed me. Everything was starting to get serious. New ministry job, new pressures, the spotlight on. Success can be just as terrifying as failure, and I felt it. The season follows Shoresy as he captains the Bulldogs through a national tournament and ends on one of the single most wrenchingly poignant moments I've ever seen on screen. A cycle composed of cycles, they managed to bring the full emotional weight, three seasons of disjointed and slightly manic sketch scenes and inside jokes, crashing down on a single sequence, leaving you gasping for breath and wondering.

How many shots at this did I think I was going to get? Every single second is a gift. The clock isn't stopping. This moment in time, these friends, these children, these images of joy frozen below layers of memory like lines beneath the ice. What if I failed to soak up even one second of this time? How bad did I want it?

Just as fast as the blinding chaotic crescendo arrives it begins to subside. A brief moment of ecstatic energy bleeding away before you can fully grasp it. Winding down, ticking towards the finish. Backwards through each successive stage towards the start. Were you listening? It's almost over. Ba da, da dum.

Everyone has players that define their sports childhood. Mike Modano, the seasoned veteran of the Dallas Stars, was one of mine after our business trip. You can catch him as a babyfaced cameo in Disney’s Mighty Ducks, sporting the sweater of Dallas’ predecessor squad from Minnesota. But his age meant that he wasn’t prominent in the league for long, and I quickly gravitated towards the face of the next generation.

When Alexander Ovechkin stepped on the ice during his rookie year, the building shifted. You cannot understand it if you weren't watching him at the time. One of the first of a new era of forwards, Ovechkin would swarm through the neutral zone with like a cyclone, all windmill dekes and fearless intensity. He approached defenses like they owed him money, and every shift was an exercise in breathless ferocity. Equally capable of throwing explosive forecheck hits or dismantling goalies with breathtaking creativity, he brought a passion I'd never seen to the sport. He played like it was his last time stepping on the ice, skating downhill inches from sprawling disaster at every moment. He seemed to believe that the balance of the game was on his shoulders, and he alone could conquer through desire alone. And then he did.

I grew up, changed states, graduated college, got married, had kids, and Ovechkin played for the Washington Capitals. For twenty years. The other night, I sat on the couch with my children and watched him pass Wayne Gretzky's career goals record. He's an old man now, especially in hockey terms. His game is less energy and more precision, getting to the exact position for the perfect shot. But you can still see him there, the same fresh wonder under the years of punishment. The kids asked me who he was, and I tried to explain. But how do you tell them that a hockey player helped teach you how to live? Every time he touches the ice, I still catch myself holding my breath.

The other day I took the kids down to the driveway and taught them to use the sticks and roller puck my Dad had gotten them for Christmas. I’d love to tell you it was some sort of Kodak moment where everything snapped into focus and electric joy ran to the tips of my fingers. There were a few too many complaints and a little too much chasing errant pucks into last year’s leaves for that. But you just need seconds, sometimes. A sheepish smile. “Dad, show me how you make the puck jump like that.” They copy your slang, just once. Two weeks later, they ask when we’re going to do it again.

The final notes bleed into the air one after the other. Gassed out and lilting, all gone in joyous spendthrift energy. In the end, everything filtered down to this. Only a few moments really mattered. Did you take the shot?

I still tell myself and my family and my friends that “this team will never lose again.” Nowadays it’s inexplicably coming true. I wonder if God is like a coach watching me slow-skate my way through the biggest period of my life. Whispering under His breath as I take half of the last chances I’ll ever have. Asking me what I’m really playing for. Willing me to find something more, just one more time. Knowing it’s in there, dragging it out of me shift after punishing shift. I’m glad He put my line in. Everything we got now, boys.

Last minute of play in this period.

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