This was something I wrote in Clifton Park after the Suffern-Shenendehowa game. Or maybe it was the next morning. Anyway, I saved it but never posted it for some reason, and I just discovered it. Seeing as I don’t have much material for high school hockey right now and I’m busy with volleyball, I figured I’d throw it on here.

To set the stage – this was the last stop on my six day Massena-to-Buffalo-to-Albany road trip, following Clarkstown North and Suffern around for state tournament games. I was starting to lose my grip.

Original title: My road trip comes to an end:

I long to see the green fields of Suffern again.

Since this is my blog, I feel a personal narrative is in order. I need to explain how hectic tonight was.

Tonight’s chapter in the road trip of the Journal News hockey writer was possibly the most difficult. All through the playoff season, the deadlines for stories have been very tight. Everybody in the office is really anxious, and they start calling your cell phone around the time they think your game should be ending, asking if it’s over yet and making sure you’ve already got something written that you can send to them when the final buzzer sounds. I can handle that, but when I’m upstate at a rink that I’m not familiar with, it’s a little tougher because I’m unfamiliar with my surroundings.

By the way, we need to use a phone line to send stories because e-mailing them doesn’t work. They come through in a different format and it can cause a major catastrophe. That means I usually need to duck into an office at one of the rinks to hook my computer up to a phone line and send the story.

Anyway, at the Clifton Park Ice Arena, I had a little trouble. I had no cell reception, and the constant search for reception killed the battery. I had a car charger, but I had to park about half a mile away because the parking lot was packed when I got there. So calling the office wasn’t a simple question of ducking outside to my car between periods. I wouldn’t make it back in time for the start of the next period.

I busy myself between periods writing parts of the story, but I’m starting to worry about what I’m going to do afterward. My cell is dead, so I can’t call the office and tell them what’s going on. I decide I’ll wait until the game ends, get everything together, duck into somebody’s office at the rink, call the Journal News from a land line, give them the result and the stats, then use that same land line to send something in for Northern Westchester before I go interview the Suffern people. Then I’ll throw some quotes into the story and send it in again for the Rockland edition. Perfect.

The game ends, and I duck out to see where I can make a call from. Every office in the place, even the concession stand, is locked up. I go outside and try to turn my cell phone back on. No juice. I realize I either have to run out to my car, plug the phone in, call the office with an update for the website, give them the stats, and run back before Suffern gets on the bus OR do my interviews and then head out to the car to make the phone call, at which point I may already be fired for being out of touch for so long.

I decide it’s best to talk to Suffern first. I do a couple of quick, nervous interviews, and I split. I consider just borrowing somebody else’s phone, but these calls to the office can end up being a little longer than you expect sometimes. I walk over to my car, I viciously tear the plastic off of the brand new car charger for my brand new cell phone, and I plug it in. It doesn’t work. It doesn’t work!

It’s another 10 minutes to drive over to my hotel. In newspaper time, that’s about a week.

Remember that scene from Psycho when Marian is leaving town with the stolen money, and as she drives along she hears all of these voices in her head of people back home wondering where she is? That was my drive back to the hotel. I imagined Journal News sports editors slamming the receivers of their phones on their desks as my cell phone’s outgoing message plays for the 15th time. “WHERE IS DAN?” they scream.

I also imagined there were people on this blog asking the same question. Apparently, that part wasn’t paranoia.

I get back to the hotel room, and I find I’ve left Shen’s roster in the car and all I have written down in my notebook are jersey numbers. I have to run back out.

I call in the stats, huffing and puffing, and then I write up something for the Northern Westchester edition and send it in. I call to make sure it’s there. It isn’t. I hang up and send it again. This time it works.

While working on putting quotes in for the Rockland edition, my digital voice recorder’s batteries go. I’ve got AAA batteries in my car usually for just such an emergency, but the interior of a car tends to get a little messy on a six day road trip. Good luck finding batteries in there.

I start pulling quotes from my notebook, and I consider making a few up. The Suffern people won’t mind. They won. They’re going to the final four. They’re in a good mood. Maybe they won’t even notice.

A stroke of genius! I get the batteries from the remote control for the TV. They don’t work. Apparently they had just enough power to change channels, but not enough to run a tape recorder. I run down to the front desk, and luckily they have some extra. Thus, we have actual quotes for the paper.

So that’s the grand finale of the upstate road trip. But it’s not quite over yet. I come home tomorrow, then I think I’m taking the day off on Monday and traveling up to Salmon River on Tuesday before the game. I’ve had it with these two-night hotel stays.

I was thinking about all this debate and hype about Suffern, and it got me thinking about the state semifinal game against Ithaca — the controversy over the Nick Clark goal in the first overtime that was waved off, the shootout, etc. Everyone agrees that a shootout is a pretty poor way to decide an important game, so I’ve come up with an alternative that I think is going to revolutionize hockey.

The obvious problem with long scoreless games in the semifinals is that if you don’t eventually stop it, the winner will be too tired to play in the final the next day. But instead of doing four overtimes and then going to a shootout, they should start removing players from the ice in the third overtime. Play 4-on-4, then 3-on-3, 2-on-2, and finally 1-on-1 (not counting goalies).

Then my original plan called for just the goalies to play each other. You start them off crouched down inside their own nets, behind the goal line, put the puck at center ice, back away, and blow the whistle. They both come charging out and you sit back and enjoy the most entertaining 30 seconds of hockey action you’ve ever seen.

Then it occured to me that neither goalie would move from in front of their goals, because they would be less worried about a fellow goalie beating them 1-on-1 than about the other guy chucking a lucky one into the empty net. So you would have to start them off at center ice and not allow them to enter either crease. Or it would have to be two regular players with no goalies. But I really like the 1-on-1 goalie idea.

THEN I got an even better one. Make the overtime periods four minutes long, and instead of decreasing the number of players, increase the number of pucks. Two pucks in the third overtime, three pucks in the fourth overtime. By the sixth OT the goalie won’t know where it’s coming from. Hilarious.

As you can tell, I’m not really in hockey mode at the moment – not in any serious way at least. For me, the season is still pretty far off. I’ve got volleyball to worry about.

But I was wondering what goes on in the fall. I’m pretty ignorant of the schedules of travel teams and all that. Anybody know what’s going on these days, if anything?