The Game

by Ken Dryden

I am comfortable here. It is not only a place to dress and undress, to wind up for and wind down from games. It is a place to relax and get away. It is our refuge. When

If you were to spend some time with a team, without ever watching them on the ice, it wouldn’t take long before you discovered who its goalies were. Goalies are different. Whether it’s because the position attracts certain personality types, or only permits certain ones to succeed; whether the experience is so intense and fundamental that it transforms its practitioners to type—I don’t know the answer. But whatever it is, the differences between “players” and “goalies” are manifest and real, transcending as they do even culture and sport.

A game we once played on rivers and ponds, later on streets and driveways and in backyards, we now play in arenas, in full team uniform, with coaches and referees, or to an ever-increasing extent we don’t play at all. For, once a game is organized, unorganized games seem a wasteful use of time; and once a game moves indoors, it won’t move outdoors again. Hockey has become suburbanized, and as part of our suburban middle-class culture, it has changed.