Congratulations on Getting Roughed Up at a Hockey Game!

Grown men with bodies far from athletic will be wearing jerseys in the bleachers, screaming down at the ice at volumes so intense you won’t be able to discern their individual words or even their intent, just an underlying sense of rage and indignation, blanketed by a desperation to assert some sort of masculine control over their world.  The only women will be bloated and bleak faced aging harridans in puffy coats, clutching steaming cups of coffee, staring out at the ice with a distance and detachment that comes with having accepted an abysmally dull life as their calling.  These two groups will make up the crowd.  These two groups and you.

So when you ask the bleak faced woman next to you “Where’s all this enthusiasm come from?” it shouldn’t shock you when the entire crowd turns around as a single organism, whipping their heads in unison, possessed of a singular will.

They won’t respond to your question by attempting to share their interest, or seeing your neutral, if somewhat dickish, question as an opportunity to prove that hockey fans aren’t a collective of violent half-wits.  No, they’ll respond to it by surging towards you in a human wave, towards and past, above, below, enveloping you in their grasp.  The movement will paralyze you, the clutch of humanity will grip you like quicksand and your instinct to go limp will kick in as the crowd, an enormous singular entity of animal logic rather than a collective of individuals, takes hold of you and the first blows fall upon your flesh.

Fist by fist they’ll hammer your skin and bones, tearing at your body.  There will be no apparent order, no terms of engagement.  Men and women will strike you collectively, tearing at your body and eroding your will until you, weeping, are moved out of the stadium upon the hands of the crowd, still acting as one creature.  It won’t be until after you’ve passed the nacho and hot dog repository, the skate rental kiosk and the massive steel doors meant to keep in the cold that the mass of the crowd will dissipate and a single entity will emerge: a lone boot that collides with your ribs as you lay upon the concrete.  The glob of spit that follows, striking your face, will be a part of that entity as well.

“Fuck you, Bruins rule!” the voice of the crowd will rise in chorus and chime at you.  You, on the pavement, will have no words, no further questions, no breath, though you will have a newfound understanding of the appeal of hockey.

Congratulations on Getting Roughed Up at a Hockey Game!