The Emotion

I learnt something on the weekend.

I learnt that it's a very strange feeling to have a sudden burst of completely uncharacteristic emotion.

It was an incredibly intense combination of frustration, anger, and disappointment. And I very nearly responded to it primevally - beating up on the goal and breaking my hockey stick. Instead, being the sane(ish), level-headed kind of person I am, I said to myself "You'll look like a dick and it won't achieve anything" and almost instantly the feeling disappeared. So much so that seconds later I was joking with folk about it all.

You see, we were playing promotion/relegation on Sunday. Basically playing to go up a grade. At the end of regulation play it was 2-2. The referee sadistically called time just as one of our guys was lining up a huge shot at goal. It was mean, but the ref definitely showed a rather funny sense of comedic timing. Anyway, that lead to a couple of periods of golden goal, and then to strokes if it was still even.

My moment came in the dying seconds of the second extra period, having made an (uncharacteristically) decent save at the top of the circle, only to be surrounded by 3 opposition players and none of my team. Unsurprisingly they scored. Equally surprisingly I felt an incredibly intense combination of frustration, anger, and disappointment as a consequence of loosing the game, and hence our promotion, despite having done my best while feeling the rest of the team let me (and consequently themselves) down.

It was weird. It was cool. It was learning.

Neat eh?!