Hope Skates Back

A few weeks ago, our weekend was all hockey, all the time.

My grandson is 9 and played on the Mites team. My granddaughter is 11 and roughly the size of a hockey bag. She played on the Squirts team, on a boys’ team, no less, which already tells you something about her grit.

Between the two of them, we had eight games in three days, three Starbucks runs, more rink coffee than any woman should reasonably consume, and one grandmother who is still not entirely convinced feeling has returned to all her toes.

And honestly, the best part of the whole weekend wasn’t the scores. It wasn’t the standings. It wasn’t even the hockey itself.

It was being with family and cheering on two of my favorite little hockey players.

Saturday morning began at 8:00 with my grandson’s team. These are little boys in enormous helmets who look like bobbleheads on blades. And that morning, their goalie was a first-year player.

Sweet kid. Brave kid. A kid who skated to the net for what looked like the very first time and fell down.

Then got up.
Then fell again.
Then got up.
Then fell a third time.
Then got up.
Then fell a fourth time.
At that point, the whole rink was holding its breath.

The other team noticed immediately. You could practically see them thinking, Well. There’s our opening.

But then something beautiful happened. Those boys on his team didn’t say a word. Nobody called a timeout. Nobody held a strategy meeting. Nobody skated over with a whiteboard and a motivational speech.

They just knew.
They hustled back, formed a wall, and did everything in their power to make sure that puck never got near that kid again.
And at the end of that game, and the games after that too, win or lose, the very first player every one of those boys skated to celebrate with was that goalie.

That wobbly, four-times-fallen, never-quit goalie.
I may have cried, but in my defense, rink air is very dry.

I’ve been thinking about that scene ever since.

Because most of us, on any given week, are that goalie.

Suited up.
Showed up.
Skated out to the net looking like we have it together.
And then we fall down four times in a row in front of everyone we know.

The fall is not the part that undoes us.
The fall is just the fall.
What undoes us is the fear that we’re out there alone. That nobody noticed we went down. That if we don’t get up fast enough, the whole thing collapses, and it’s on us.

But here’s what those little boys reminded me of, in their too-big helmets and their too-big hearts:

We are not actually out there alone.

Help shows up in ways we don’t always recognize until later.

Sometimes it looks like a wall of teammates.
Sometimes it looks like a phone call at the right moment.
Sometimes it looks like someone quietly stepping in without making a scene.
Sometimes it looks like a thought that lands deep in your chest and whispers, Get up one more time.

And I happen to believe that kind of help is not an accident.

I think hope is more than a feeling we try to manufacture on hard days. I think hope is an actual presence. And I think it tends to show up most clearly in the middle of the fall, not after we’ve gotten ourselves cleaned up, steadied, and back on our feet.

That’s the part that keeps preaching to me.

We spend so much of life waiting to become the version of ourselves who finally has it all figured out.

The version who doesn’t fall.
The version with the answers.
The plan.
The steady footing.

And in the meantime, we miss the gift right in front of us:

We are being held up now.

Wobbly.
Falling.
Getting back up.
Falling again.

Right here in the middle.

The goalie didn’t earn the wall of teammates by becoming a better goalie.

He got the wall while he was still falling.

That’s the whole point.

The weekend went on from there.

More games.
More coffee.
More frozen toes.

A championship game with officiating so creative I briefly wondered if the refs had been handed the wrong rulebook.

At one point, my granddaughter, the smallest player on the ice and the only girl on her team, got called for roughing.

Roughing.
This child.

The parents in the stands had thoughts. I will not repeat them here, as I am trying to keep this piece suitable for decent people.

My grandson’s team took third.
My granddaughter’s team took second.

And both kids skated off the ice grinning, because at that age, you have not yet learned to let a scoreboard tell you how you’re doing.

Maybe that’s something worth unlearning for us adults.

Because the real win that weekend wasn’t on any scoreboard.
It was the bleachers.
The shared snacks.
The cold hands wrapped around bad coffee.
The gift of watching two small humans get back up every time they went down.
It was being there for it.
It was the wall of little boys who knew, without anyone telling them, that the kid in the net was theirs to protect.

Hope is not waiting for us at the finish line.
Hope is the wall of teammates skating back while we’re still on the ice.
Hope is the next shift.
Hope is the hand that helps us up the fourth time as willingly as it did the first.

And on the days when we feel most like that wobbly goalie, overwhelmed, outmatched, sure everyone is watching us fall, it helps to remember:

We are not the only ones on the ice.
We never were.

As for me, I’m still thawing out.
And fairly certain I personally helped keep Starbucks in business that weekend.

But I came home with something better than a trophy.
I came home reminded that the real work of life happens in the middle:

In the falling.
In the getting up.
In the showing up for the people we love.

And hope — the real kind — is already here.

Skating back.
Forming the wall.
Refusing to let us go down alone.

Just me?

I don’t think so.