Tournament Beers

What's next? I'll tell you what's next, the Hamilton Barton Double Rinks Hockey Tournament. That's what's next.
As far back as I can remember hockey tournaments have always been a special occasions. There is the initial "looking-forward-to-the-weekend" phase, which usually entails discussing the impending festivities with your teammates. Then there is the actual game day phase, which usually means driving to some backwater, dog patch town, showing up to the arena, scoping out the usually terrible and barley usable facilities, finding out what division you are in and what other backwater dog patch town teams you will be playing.
When I was younger we travelled to dozens of small towns all over Ontario to play in tournaments. In fact most of my geographical knowledge of this province was gained through traveling to these towns for either hockey or baseball tournaments. I mean really, why else would I ever have to travel to Minden, Coldwater, Burks Falls, Tilsonbourg or Beaverton. If it wasn't for tournaments I probably wouldn't have ever seen these places and there amazingly inadequate arenas.
Tournaments also meant that my parents usually stringent eating out rules became a little more lax. Under normal circumstance there was only a snowballs chance in hell that we would get to eat at MacDonald's or any other of the many grease laden fast food eateries pocked across this province. But for whatever reason when ever we were away at a tournament my parents eased up, opened their wallets and treated us to these gastronomic gifts. Truly this was something to look forward too.
The hockey was pretty important too, back then we actually took pride in playing well and maybe walking away with another gold painted, plastic hockey player caught in mid stride and positioned on top of a faux-wood trophy. These trophies were a serious source of pride for young would be NHLers. They would be strategically positioned in the most visible area of your bedroom so that when friends or relatives were over they could clearly see them and you could brag about your victories. And if you were very lucky and played really well you may even end up walking away with an MVP medallion for your efforts. These were truly special and hard to come by. They were usually bronze coin-like-medallions hung off a red-white and blue ribbon. And they were considered the show pieces of your trophy shelf.
But alas this playing for pride and bragging rights seems to have faded into distant memory.
Now instead of playing to win you usually play just to not look bad. You're playing for respectability instead of pride. And the main focus of the tournament has shifted from the hockey and to the festivities (and by festivities I mean drinking) after, before and during the game.
For whatever reason all the rules go out the window when you're at a hockey tournament. Normally you wouldn't start drinking at 10am and continue sporadically throughout the day depending on your schedule. But at tournament none of this matters. The first beers are cracked as soon as you wake and depending on how you do and how far you get in the tournament don't stop flowing until the wee hours of the morning or quite possibly deep into the next day.
For the most part we have a good tournament team. We've won our share of tournaments and walked away with a number of tacky gifts like tee-shirts, hats and hockey bags. Thus proving to all that we can play well both drunk and hungover. But the tournament this weekend was exceptionally bad. We didn't score a goal until the second period of our second game and ended up losing all three games to teams that under normal circumstances we would have beat hands down. It may have had something to do with the amount of beer we consumed between games but I hate to bad mouth beer so I won't. I'll just say we played badly and we're getting older.
As bad as we played and at times looked like we didn't even want to be playing at all, I still looked forward to this tournament and I still kept up my tournament eating habits and ate horribly (a strict diet of Nachos, wings and chili for three days) but it has become blatently apparent that the hockey has definitely taken a back seat to the beer and bonding with team mates.
Luckily we can redeem ourselves at our next tournament in April. I've already marked it on my calendar and I'm starting to feel the anticipation for the weekend building.
So what's next?