Tournament redux

One tournament in the books and now the regular season beckons.

I wasn’t 100% accurate with my pre-tournament predictions, in that we didn’t win a game, but all of the games that we did lose, and we lost 2, were within the 4 goals or less prediction.

The first game we lost 3-1 and we didn’t get beaten by a more skilled group of individuals but rather we got beaten by a group of individuals that played as a team. I remember watching them in the warm ups and thinking that, from a skill stand point, they looked just like our kids.

But they had obviously played together last year, or the majority of the team had anyway, and it showed in the way they played on the ice. They played a better positional game and moved the puck much better than Hockey Player’s team.

We actually had Hockey Player sit out the second game because of concerns at school. He missed the last half hour of class to play in the first game and he would have had to miss a whole hour to play in the second game, and my wife and I thought that was too much for him to miss. We wanted to send the message that school has to come before hockey.

The second game was one that I thought they might win but ended in a 2-2 tie. The funny part was, because the other game in their pool ended in a tie, they actually had a chance to advance to the play off round if they could win their 3rd game.

My wife took HP to the 3rd game and she said something that I have felt for quite a while; that this year won’t be a repeat of the debacle that was last year because the kids all try hard. The score was 5-2, with the 5th goal being scored into an empty net. HP got an assist on one of the goals.

The season starts this weekend and the first two games are against two of the top teams from last season. Nothing like jumping into the deep end with both feet and all of that!