The Varsity Match (part four)
Pandemonium.
Eli 23.6 was one of the first players to reach the shooter after the score. He's flying. Everyone in the stands was screaming their heads off, except for the fifty or so Cambridge fans.
It's one of the greatest celebrations I've ever seen, with the most dramatic finish imaginable. I've only seen that ending once in over forty years of watching hockey.
Soon, a Cambridge player will skate out and shout at the refs and be summarily ejected. Hard feelings, and I can understand. Those players gave everything they had, too. They were gutted.
The players skated around the rink to thank the crowd, and as Eli skated by, I recognize the look on his face. It's joy.
He's been playing hockey for fifteen years. Now he'd done the one thing left he said was missing in his career--win the Rivalry Match.
Eli was named game MVP, and his name will be engraved on the platter along with other players who had their moment in this special game.
We talked briefly after the game, but had a much longer call the next day. I asked him what it felt like to have that career-defining moment in the biggest game.
His answer surprised me. The first two words he said were "enormous gratitude." Only a few players in any sport ever get to experience what he did, he said, no matter how many years they play. And if the hockey gods hadn't been looking out for him in overtime, he wouldn't have experienced it, either. And he said long after he's forgotten every other game he ever played, he'll remember this one.
Down four skaters, including their best player, everyone gave everything they had. Eli told me their best defenseman played FORTY-FIVE MINUTES of a sixty-five minute game. It's inconceivable, but that's what it took. He couldn't have had that moment without them.
This might be the last time I tell one of his hockey stories. It might be his last season. I feel so lucky that I got to tell one more, though. Especially this one.
The Varsity Match (part three)
The live feed of the game didn't work, but Eli 23.6 was able to send me links to several Twitch videos (with awful audio quality because the crowd was so loud it overwhelmed the microphone levels), so I was able to watch everything except the first half of the second period.
What I'm about to tell you is a combination of what I saw and what Eli told me.
The capacity of the rink is 1,025, and it was full. Stuffed. And the crowd was deafening, right from the start.
Cambridge came out with a huge bust of energy. They had twelve shots in the first ten minutes, and Oxford had trouble clearing the puck. They weren't scoring, though, and seven minutes into the period, the Blues had a chance and scored.
It was already clear that Oxford was going to be doing a lot of double-shifting during this game. I kept seeing lots of the same players on the ice.
At the end of the first period, it was 1-0 Oxford, even though they'd been outshot 20-8. They weren't taking penalties, though, which was key, because Cambridge's power play is dangerous.
Less than a minute into the second period, Cambridge scored on a back door play after the defenseman lost the forward and Eli couldn't get over in time.
1-1.
Cambridge kept peppering Eli with shots, but they weren't scoring, and with nine minutes left in the period, Oxford scored again. Suddenly, they were up 2-1.
Right after this, I was able to start watching the game again, and guys were clearly already exhausted. They couldn't skate with Cambridge, but they were doing everything else, including diving to block shots. I have so much respect for these guys and how hard they played.
They hung on to the end of the period. Oxford 2-1.
Total shots at that point were 41-16.
Eli wasn't making any spectacular saves, but then, he almost never does. He was just in the right place, making the right decisions, and anticipating the play before it happened. His best games almost look boring because he sucks all of the air out of the rink.
The third period began, and Oxford had shut it down offensively, just sinking in to defend. This is hard to do for an entire period, and Cambridge was firing shot after shot.
It looked like the Blues were going to pull it off, though.
With four minutes left, there were offsetting minors, and it was four-on-four hockey for two minutes. Until Oxford took another penalty thirty-nine seconds later.
Suddenly Cambridge had a four-on-three for over a minute.
The penalties weren't stupid or sloppy. Guys were utterly exhausted and hanging on with everything they had. Their feet just wouldn't move anymore.
With two minutes left, Cambridge ran the back door play again. Eli was just sitting there, waiting for it, but the shooter put it over his shoulder into a tiny spot in the corner of the net.
Just like that, the game was tied.
Within a minute, they came down again, and a Cambridge player snapped a wrist shot that was going in, but Eli was somehow able to deflect it with his glove and it went over the crossbar.
In the next two minutes, Cambridge took a penalty (briefly giving Oxford a power play, then Oxford took one a minute later.
After 60 minutes, it was still tied.
Oxford had been outshot 65-22, but they were giving it everything they had, and they still had a chance.
I should mention here that goalies rarely win these kinds of games. They might have a brilliant performance, but it's just not the kind of game you win.
I should also mention that one of the quirks of the rulebook for the Varsity Match is that no overtime format is specified. Cambridge lobbied for a full, twenty-minute overtime period, which would have been disastrous, because they had more skaters and were fresher. Oxford successfully lobbied for the standard five-minute overtime period.
Overtime began.
Cambridge started on the power play and took several dangerous shots that Eli handled. Then the puck wound up on a Cambridge player's stick right in front of the net and he slid it it along the ice.
Eli looked behind him because he was a split-second late to go down and thought the puck went in. He'd played a brilliant game, but they had lost.
Then the Hockey Gods intervened. It was trapped in his equipment. No goal.
With a minute left in overtime, the game was headed to a shootout.
Cambridge was still hammering away in the Oxford zone as the clock ran down. With less than ten seconds, they had a shot blocked, the puck took a weird bounce, and suddenly Oxford had a two-on-one out of nowhere, with a clear path to the goal. Another Cambridge player rushed to get back and hooked the Oxford skater bearing down on net.
Time expired.
The referee had their hand up, signaling a penalty. It didn't mean much, because a two-minute penalty at that point was meaningless. The game was going to a shootout.
Then the referees huddled together.
After a conference that lasted almost a minute, they signaled for a penalty shot.
This would be an untimed penalty shot, because even though they had signaled for a penalty during overtime, it wouldn't be called until Cambridge touched the puck or time expired, which it did. It's one of the rarest things that can happen in a game.
Chaos.
The crowd was losing its mind for about the fiftieth time. Every player on the team had given everything they had, and now they had a chance to win without going to a shootout.
What followed was the longest penalty shot in history, as the Oxford skater lazily went almost all the way to the left boards before heading back toward the net. This is usually disastrous, because it cuts off the shooter's angle. He deked a shot, then skated right in until he could almost touch the goalie and tried a shot through the five-hole.
Even the shooter didn't think it went in, at first. Until the referee raised their arm. Game.
Final shot total: Cambridge 69, Oxford 25. Final score: Oxford 3, Cambridge 2.
I'll talk about the post-match scene tomorrow, but fair to say, it was pandemonium. Until then, the scoresheet:
The Varsity Match (part two)
The University of Oxford was founded in 1096. Historically, it was a period known as the High Middle Ages.
The University of Cambridge was founded in 1209, by a group of disgruntled scholars from Oxford.
Thus, the rivalry began immediately, and continues, unabated, 816 years later.
For your reference, it is a rivalry every bit as intense as Alabama-Auburn, Michigan-Ohio St., or Oklahoma-Texas. Heated doesn't describe it adequately. Grudges emerge and fester for decades if not centuries.
That's the background.
Oxford went to Cambridge eight days before the Rivalry Match with the conference title on the line. They needed to at least tie to win their conference. Cambridge, in this era, always has a deeper and more talented team. This was true this year as well.
However, this Oxford team has a quality. They play hard. They give absolutely everything they have. In short, they're dogs, which is a high compliment.
Down 2-1 going into the 3rd period, they pulled out one of the grittiest wins Eli said he'd ever seen. Tied it at 2-2 midway through the third, then scored again 5 seconds later. They added an empty netter for a 4-2 win.
Eli 23.6 faced 45 shots, according to the scoresheet.
I talked to him the day after and he said everyone was exhausted. It was the ultimate effort, and now they had to turn around and face Cambridge again eight days later for much higher stakes.
That's what rivalries do. They drain everything you have.
There are special rules for the Varsity Match because it's not part of the conference. It predates the conference by over a century, in fact, and one of the specifications in the lengthy rule book is that all players must be matriculating students--i.e., no year abroad students or visiting scholars.
What this meant is that Oxford would be down three players who all played on the top two lines.
The morning of the match, Eli messaged me that their best player was so sick he was in the hospital. Norovirus, or something adjacent. Now they were down four players, including their best forward.
Tt was going to be a tough night.
I sent him a message telling him I was happy that he knew how to battle, but I was even happier that he enjoyed the battle. Go out and battle and be happy.
That's one of the many things he taught me: it's not enough to battle. You have to embrace the battle.
There was supposed to be a live feed of the game, but it wasn't working and never came online. And the game started over an hour late, so it was a long wait to find out what happened.
This is what happened.
[Okay, I'm still really ill, plus I added a corneal abrasion today, so I'm going to tell the rest tomorrow. And I'm also enjoying dragging it out a little.]
The Varsity Match
The first edition of the annual Oxford-Cambridge ice hockey rivalry, known as the "Varsity Match," was played in 1885.
From 1913 forward, the only years the game wasn't played were due to two World Wars.
This year was the 108th time the Rivalry Game had been played.
Oxford and Cambridge now play additional two times a year, in a home-away format for conference play. These games, however, pale in significance to the Varsity Match. Actually, every single other game combined is less important in total than the Varsity Match.
Three years ago, at Cambridge, Eli 23.6 made 59 saves, but his team lost 3-2. Last year, at Cambridge, they lost 6-1 (I don't know the shot total, but it was high), bringing the streak of Varsity Matches Cambridge had won consecutively to seven.
The Varsity Match of 2025 was played on Sunday. It was the most dramatic finish in the history of the rivalry.
I'll tell you about it tomorrow.
Streak Over
I haven't been sick in almost five years.
Three days with two small children, though? Guaranteed infection. I'm going down, as they say, and so is C.
It's better to be sick with someone, though. No complaints.
It's not COVID, apparently, just some random mutant plague we've contracted. I've managed to be productive, though, and this is the last thing I'm doing before I turn my brain off for the rest of the day (reading this, you may argue I've already turned it off).
The only disappointing aspect of the day is that Mohammed Amer ("Mo" on Netflix and also a fine comedian) is in GR tonight and we had tickets, which have now been given away. A necessary sacrifice, given our current condition.
Queens
I went to New York City in 1980, staying overnight in Manhattan enroute to Massachusetts for a job as a summer camp counselor. I don't know why I stayed overnight, exactly, but it was a residence, and the camp paid for it.
I hadn't been back since then. Until last weekend, I went to Queens to meet C's other daughter/son-in-law/grandchildren.
Queens wasn't I expected. It was dense (which I did expect), but it felt much less like part of a huge city and more its own neighborhood, particularly the little area I was in. We walked it all on Monday, just before we left to go back to Grand (Gray) Rapids.
The sun was shining, and it was cold and and incredibly windy. The sting on your face when you turned a corner was real. We walked to the grocery story and a fruit market and it was all so genial. The fruit market also had cheaper fruit and vegetables than Grand Rapids, and the fruit was ripe, too.
There's a strange Midwestern thing where fruit is never ripe. The fruit in stores has been picked long before it's ripe because it will stay sellable longer, but that also means it tastes lousy.
Not in Queens, though. It was all beautiful.
I particularly enjoyed seeing how everyone was different. Down a single street, you might hear people speaking four different languages, and there were so many styles of dress and culture. Uniqueness (in any way) is not a strong suit of Grand Rapids, or the Midwest in particular.
The grandchildren are two (almost three) and four months old. This means every day starts at 5:30 a.m. My favorite moment was at 6 a.m. one morning when the infant was yelling his head off and the two-year-old was running back and forth down the hall shouting "Tai chi! Tai chi!"
That one moment made the whole trip worth it.
Another Generation (Writing)
I went to Queens for the weekend. I'll tell you about it tomorrow.
Eli 23.6. sent me a short piece he's working on for the Oxford Review of Something or Other. I enjoy editing his work because I understand, and I can usually tease out the heart of what he's writing, sometimes before he sees it himself. Plus the editing process is so rewarding. It makes you defend what you believe to be important and why.
Writing creatively is exhilarating for him compared to academic writing, and it's thrilling for me to see how much he loves it and how committed he is to acquiring skills and developing. The calls when we talk about writing are so memorable, and it helps me be more excited about my own writing, because getting up every morning and working on a novel can be such a slog.
I wouldn't be surprised if he becomes an academic with an enormous amount of creative writing as a side hustle. I want to be around for as long as I can to see what happens.
Resuming Tomorrow
I'm having a travel day today (back from NYC), and we're not getting back until after 11. I'll be back to normal tomorrow.
Friday Links!
Leading off this week, a wonderful video (thanks, Qt3 forums): The Hidden Pattern in Post Codes.
An excellent read: ‘It’s a cowboy show out there’: the deadly lottery of the snakebite antivenom industry.
Gee, what a surprise: Did you know the top brass at ARMA and DayZ studio Bohemia Interactive bought a 'disinformation outlet' in 2023?
Quite the bizarre story (but not in a bad way, really): A flooded quarry, a mysterious millionaire and the dream of a new Atlantis.
From Wally, and I couldn't even collect any blurbs for mine: The End of the Blurb. Thank God. Christie's is having an AI art auction (anything they can make money from, I guess): What is AI art? And now it's lucrative: 100,000 Eggs Are Stolen in Pennsylvania Amid Shortage.
From C. Lee, and it needs to be read: Their democracy died. They have lessons for America about Trump’s power grab. And another: The broligarchs have a vision for the new Trump term. It’s darker than you think. This is a bad, bad trend: The cod-Marxism of personalized pricing. What an incredible moron: Video Game Exec Pleads Guilty to Crashing Drone Into Firefighting Plane During LA Wildfires. A fascinating read: Black Death, COVID, and Why We Keep Telling the Myth of a Renaissance Golden Age and Bad Middle Ages. This one, too: The Lost Towers of the Guelph-Ghibelline Wars. In other words, a minimum wage barely over $7 is a dystopian joke: Mapped: The Living Wage for a Family of Four, by State. This is why inflation could be insanely dangerous for the economy: Visualizing the Growth of U.S. Consumer Debt. So many close calls, considering the consequences: When Russian Radar Mistook a Norwegian Scientific Rocket for a U.S. Missile, the World Narrowly Avoided Nuclear War. A gentle story: A Sunfish Got ‘Lonely’ When Its Aquarium Closed for Renovations. Then, Staff Found a Creative Way to Cheer It Up. A thoughtful rumination: Marjorie Liu Reflects On the Immortality of Superman. And this as well: Advice for those contemplating suicide: Flee the situation instead.
Taking Care of Business
After cleaning the house and putting in 250+ edits (for 12 pages, and if you think that's bad, you should have seen the first draft), it was already almost 3 and I still had my full set of stomach/hip/back exercises to do (which take about 45 minutes).
I had nothing. I was desperate.
So I put on Bachman Turner Overdrive's Greatest Hits, not because it was going to help much, but because that album is tied to a specific moment in my life.
Summer before junior year in high school, to be exact.
The #1 tennis player on the team was named Jeff W, and he was cool. Not with the asterisk "tennis cool," either. He could have played any sport he wanted, and the way he played tennis--by serving and volleying, along with hitting big topspin on his forehand--was physical in a way that none of us could copy. He was extremely popular, and life seemed easy for him.
Life often turns out not easy at all for those people, but I digress.
He was playing a league match at the tennis center one late afternoon, and I was a few courts down practicing my serve or something. He came swaggering in with a boombox, and when his opponent came a few minutes later, he asked if playing music was okay. His opponent didn't care, so he slapped in a cassette tape of BTO's Greatest Hits.
The weather was perfect. The sun had gone down just enough that it wasn't glaring on the court. And cool Jeff was demolishing the guy he was playing while BTO played in the background. I hit serves and snuck a look whenever I could and it was the greatest day ever.
It's been 46 years, and I never hear BTO without thinking about that day.
I made it through the exercises, which were hell on a hot biscuit today. Thanks, Jeff.
Eli 23.6
I was talking to Eli 23.6 today and he said something that I'll always remember.
He said people who lose parents at a young age (he was 19) all have one thing in common: they are better able to feel joy than the people around them.
I didn't understand.
He said going through such a profound sense of loss opens you up and makes you more human. Yes, you feel sadness more fully, but you experience joy more fully, too.
It's a terrible price to pay, he said, but he's happy in a way he never was before because he can better feel happiness. He also gained a sense that the world is beautiful, even though horrible things happen in that world.
My description isn't nearly as eloquent as his explanation.
It's a reminder that being his dad opened me up in almost the same way. I feel more than I could ever feel before, in every direction.
Yuck
I've written about this before, but I can't seem to get it out of my mind.
It's so hard to find a website with limited content. Worse, much of the content is totally out of their alleged area of expertise. Almost every website has their own Wirecutter imitation section making recommendations on hundreds of projects they've "tested." Tom's Hardware testing blenders? Sure you have.
Even Wirecutter is far from the mission of the New York Times. I miss the days when the Times was a newspaper, and choices had to be made about which content to include. That forced quality upwards. Now, though, damn near everything in the dumpster gets included.
It makes sense if you consider what businesses are trying to do. In the newspaper and magazine era, it was to inform/influence. Now the only consideration is engagement. Websites will put anything out there to make people stay because then they can serve more advertising.
I like ChatGPT, and it's great for serving information without ads, but it's still only summarizing everything it scrapes off the Web, and most of what is available to scrape is garbage. If the big promise of AI was to serve bad content in a more convenient package, it wouldn't have sounded so promising.
I'd feel better if I saw a way out of this, but I don't. Enshittification is unstoppable.
Time
I finished a long workout at the gym yesterday and felt great.
When I started walking back to my car, I felt a sharp pain in my ankle. Not soreness. Pain.
I couldn't figure out what I'd done, because I'd had no discomfort at any point during the workout. I thought it was transitory, but it wasn't. It stayed.
When I woke up this morning, I tested it out and still felt quite a bit of pain. An ankle is particularly tough for me, because the way I deal with sciatica is to--among other things--sit less. I write standing up, too.
I put on a heavy-duty ankle brace on, just for protection. As I was walking to the kitchen, I realized I was limping and walking very slowly. At that moment, I had a strange reaction.
I was intensely angry.
For twenty minutes or so, I was angry, which is incredibly uncommon for me. I don't get mad about much, unless it's bullying assholes screwing up the country. This, though, took me for a ride.
I've been watching Mom 94.11 get older. C's mom is also over 90. They both use walkers now, which is the standard for almost everyone over 90.
It's necessary, but also hard. A walker shrinks your life so much. The world in which you exist gets smaller and smaller. Mom would never admit it bothers her, but she's a strong, proud, hard woman (anyone who grew up poor in the Depression is hard), and it can't be easy.
Part of me is angry that life diminished her that way.
Now I'm so conscious of fighting that for as long as I can that even a limp sets off my radar. I didn't understand until today.
Friday Links!
Ken P. has more links later on, but let's lead off with this: 'She believed you have to take sides': How Audrey Hepburn became a secret spy during World War Two.
Also from Ken: An oral history of Twin Peaks by its unforgettable stars: ‘I put my waitress uniform on and began bawling’.
From Chris M., and it's both an interesting analysis and concerning when it comes to ultrasonic humidifiers: Better air quality is the easiest way not to die.
More from Ken P., and this checks out (McSweeney's): How to Become a Professional Writer. The jackets will be here soon: Beat the Heat: UCLA’s New Cooling Device Drops Temperatures by 16 Degrees Continuously. This is ugly: Subaru Security Flaws Exposed Its System For Tracking Millions of Cars. This was inevitable and will only get worse: The Pentagon says AI is speeding up its ‘kill chain’. I like this very much: Developer Creates Infinite Maze That Traps AI Training Bots. Don Quixote would appreciate this: Building a Medieval Castle From Scratch.
From Wally, and the predatory scams trying to ensnare writers never ends: USA Pen Press: The Ghostwriting Scam of a Thousand Websites. This is quite thoughtful: Culture, Digested: Neil Gaiman is an Industry Problem. It's what we've all been wondering, of course: Are Popovers Yorkshire Pudding? Very true: I loved Pokémon Trading Card Pocket – until I didn’t.
From C. Lee, and it's one of the positive uses of AI: Stanford Medicine's AI Model Accurately Predicts Cancer Prognoses, Treatment Efficacy. No surprise: ‘It’s a death sentence’: US health insurance system is failing, say doctors. This could be game changing (if anyone would get it): New vaccine from MIT and Caltech could prevent future coronavirus outbreaks. This is amazing! Smart Glasses Mimic Insect Eyes to Assist the Visually Impaired With Macular Degeneration. This is discouraging: Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway operates the dirtiest set of coal-fired power plants in the US. This is welcome news and also somewhat obvious: California just debunked a big myth about renewable energy. A fascinating video: Why is Japan So Weak in Software? Fascinating: How Did the Chess Pieces Get Their Names? A terrific read: Masters of the Knight: The Art of Chess Carving in India. A classic from The Digital Antiquarian: The CRPG Renaissance, Part 1: Fallout.
Rabbit Hole
When I saw today that only one NFL player (Ken Norton, Jr.) had won three consecutive Super Bowls, it sent me down a deep rabbit hole.
What started the journey was knowing that his father was Ken Norton, who most famously broke Muhammad Ali's jaw in a fight in San Diego in 1973 and won a shocking split decision.
I remember this fight quite vividly because I watched it live on ABC's Wide World of Sports one Saturday afternoon (4 p.m. Central, always). At 12 I was still a huge Ali fan and couldn't believe what I was seeing as Ken Norton controlled most of the fight. In the 11th round, he broke Ali's jaw in four places, and Ali fought the last round that way.
Howard Cosell was a much better boxing announcer than I remembered, by the way.
Ali was sluggish in the fight and barely danced, a far cry from his younger days, but when he did, his footwork was mesmerizing.
This led me back to what was considered his most dominant fight in his prime, against Cleveland Williams in 1966. I found the full three-round fight
here and spent the entire time watching Ali's feet. He was incomprehensibly quick, with probably the great footwork of any heavyweight fighter in history.
The other fighter who I always thought had incredible footwork was Mike Tyson, although his technique was cut to cut off the ring instead of dance. Tyson never reached his peak because his personal life was an abandoned mine train (later to include a rape conviction and prison sentence when he was 26), but I always wondered who would win a fight between the two at their best.
I can't watch boxing anymore. We know too much about CTE now and what a terrible toll it takes on fighters. Like today, though, I can watch the old fights, ones long in the past, and not feel like I should be ashamed for supporting the sport.
As It Happens
The gym is playing a dance mix of Mr. Brightside and I'm not in favor of capital punishment but something has to be done. It's a sonic war crime.
A Bit of a Letdown
C said the hardest part about being a physician was receiving excellent medical training and studying for years in order to say "You don't need antibiotics for that" over and over again.
Sports, Mostly
After watching NBA highlights over the weekend, I have a conviction about the future: when the aliens come, they'll wipe out humanity, then see Victor Wembanyama and say, "Okay, buddy. You can come with us."
I don't know of any NBA trade in my lifetime where a superstar approaching his prime was traded for a lesser superstar past his prime without a slew of additional compensation involved. Eli 23.6 messaged me over night with "LUKA" and a bunch of shocked face emojis. I assumed he scored 70 points in a game, went out and checked the news, and my jaw hit the floor.
"Devout Christian" Justin Tucker is now being accused of a similar masseuse roulette scandal as Deshaun Watson. I think eight women have come forward at this point with credible accusations of sexual assault.
I said this about DeShaun Watson and I'll say it again: professional athletes do not go to an endless stream of different massage therapists. Athletes use massage to fine-tune their bodies for an extraordinarily high level of performance. It's their livelihood. They will have a favorite and not go to anyone else.
It's a gigantic red flag when any athlete goes to therapist after therapist. That alone is a strong indication that something untoward (and dark) is happening.
