It’s been thirteen years since I picked up a stick. I mean really picked up a stick. It’s 7:30  on a Saturday morning, the only day I can squeeze in coaching without my boys. The wet on the turf glistens rainbows across the field as the moisture gently sneaks through the mesh of my shoes, chilling my toes and telling them to get moving or turn numb. Two dozen brown, black, blonde, and red heads can be seen bobbing up the hill towards the head coaches.  I breathe in the crispness of the sport, place my hands end and center, step my left foot to cage, and feel the familiar swooping movement through my arms and hips, as the ball powerfully glides to the top left corner.

It has been thirteen years since I have picked up a stick, held it with pride, and thought I missed you hockey, thank you.

Why now? I am an accomplished, highly educated 35 year old, old person. Why relish a forgotten dream? A dream, which crashed into a harsh reality.

Hockey materialized in my life as a floundering teenager; afraid of the kids at school, lost with no direction, and weak. Zero confidence. My entire plan when entering high school, was to melt into the back corner, read, don’t speak and skate through unnoticed. With one, three minute phone call, two weeks before school started from my school’s new Pakistani coach, a small dent appeared in my plan and eventually bared my world to possibilities.

For four years, I practiced seven days a week, 3 – 6 hours a day as a goal keeper. Not because I was forced, because I found my place. Not just “the” sport that I excelled in, but the place where I was comfortable. The place that brought friends to me, my most challenging aspect to this day. The place that showed me being pushed is an achievement in yourself, not in the person pushing you to be better. The place which led me around the country and clued me in to a world outside my hometown and the possibility of leaving it.

Leave it I did.  To an amazing college a top an idyllic hill with surrounding, winding river views.

All and none of this explains the pull to revitalize the past.

After the clink of the corner post and the fall of the orange ball, I turn and sprint toward the gathering crowd of young women and coaches. Each on their own journey with the sport. The muttering and laughter amidst the circle gives way to determinations, evaluations of play, and encouragement. Each tired, bed streaked face awakens with life, and though dread of conditioning is evident, they showed up for their team.

Camaraderie.

A word I rarely found in the dozens of others sports and employments through out my life. Having years away, one has time to reflect upon value beyond the surface. Beyond the obvious, tangible rewards a sport offers. Neither teaching in the school systems and working with amazing men and women in trying situations, or fostering mom friends to slug wine with and complain about the tirades of our kids, has provided such positive camaraderie as being a part of a female sports team.

It’s not the same. Pettiness always smears the way.

As old people, these opportunities for true comradeship are far an few between as our complicated busy lives shift the focus away from what we need, to what our kids need.

But as I stand, grasping my cracked wooden Grays stick, listening to these young women on their paths, I know this is what I need.  Not only to experience that overwhelming sense of place, but to ensure these young women can one day reflect on their experience and say, Thank you hockey, I missed you too.