Christopher HarderNicholas Harder at Game 1 in Newark.The Devils came within two games of winning the Stanley Cup, the biggest prize in hockey. As a longtime fan, I should have been bitterly disappointed. But I wasn’t, because while I followed their two-month playoff run, an unexpected hockey-watching companion developed: my six-year-old son, Nicholas. The boy who was once more interested in watching the Zamboni than the hockey game turned into a sports-page-reading fanatic.
When Nicholas was about a year-and-a-half and still learning to walk steadily on his own, I took him to a hockey arena near our home to watch the Devils train. Nicholas wasn’t impressed – yet — by a team that had won three Stanley Cups. He spent most of the time practicing climbing stairs by clanking awkwardly on stubby legs up and down the metal steps in the stands, his hand on the rail and me a step behind him.
About three years later, in the middle of the summer when the blazing sun took the temperature into the high 80s, it seemed a perfect day to head to the local pool to cool off with Nicholas. He was having none of it.
“Let’s go watch the Zamboni,” he said.
I called the same local arena to ask what time the Zamboni – the massive, boxy vehicle that resurfaces the rink between periods of a hockey game — cuts the ice.
“I have a four-year-old boy who loves to watch the Zamboni,” I explained sheepishly.
The woman on the line chuckled and told me the time, and I strapped Nicholas into his car seat and drove past the pool to the arena.
Our sandals slapped the arena floor as we walked past a boy wearing goalie pads and skates after hockey practice. The Zamboni driver, wearing gloves, a jacket and a baseball cap for warmth, was just backing the forest-green-and-white machine out of the garage to begin his oval route. In our T-shirts and shorts, we basked in the 60-degree temperature as if it were pool water.
Nicholas bounded up the same stairs he used to stumble on and chose a couple of seats in the sixth row. “Sit here, Dad,” he said, patting the seat next to him. “We can see great from here.”
We sat, entranced by the loud, hypnotic hum of the Zamboni as the fat rubber tires rolled over the chipped and scratched ice. The machine shaved off powdery ice shards and left behind a glistening surface. After 15 minutes, the Zamboni left the rink. “I’m feeling a little cold,” Nicholas said, so we left. Back outside, the humidity drenched us.
About a year later, Nicholas learned to skate on that same ice. The Devils had moved on to another practice rink.
During this year’s playoffs, Nicholas became captivated by the hockey games between the Zamboni laps. We delayed his bedtime so we could watch the first period of games together, side by side on the sofa. He memorized the names of players he ignored a few years earlier. I included photos of his favorite players in his lunchbox. He learned what a power play is. He now has a hockey shrine of photos and pucks in his room
I even kept him up past his bedtime – way past his bedtime — to take him to the first game of the Stanley Cup finals, because chances to watch a finals game in person are rare.
He seemed to appreciate this when I asked him just before overtime if he was tired and wanted to go home. “Are you crazy?” was his adrenaline-driven reply, as he leaped up the steps of the Prudential Center, his now-lankier legs enabling him to tackle many more stairs than at the practice rink.
The Devils lost the game we attended, lost the series, lost the Cup. The season’s over. Nicholas is as fickle as the next boy, and he may hang up his Devils jersey soon. As he grows up, he may glide from hockey to the next fixation, then the next, for years to come, just like he’s already moved from trains to dinosaurs to outer space to hockey in his short life.
But this spring, he and I bonded like hockey-skate laces as we cheered and agonized over every game. Our team may still have won its most recent Stanley Cup two years before Nicholas was born, but these are the games I’ll remember.