The Quest for the Shirt

Before I begin the recap of last night's game, I should provide some insight into the intramural system at Northwestern. There are three tiers of intramural sports which differ in their degree of competitiveness. The most competitive is the Purple League, which is comprised mostly of fraternities and are pretty athletic.


You wouldn't think it, but that purse is chock-full of kicking-your-ass-at-softball.

Next is the White League, which is mostly fraternities and a few graduate student teams and is slightly less competitive. It's also the league that sounds the most like a supremacist organization. This is the league my softball team tends to be in. There's a joke about the proximity of Evanston to Skokie, but it's early in the morning and I don't particularly feel like putting in the time to flesh it out.

Finally is the Co-Rec league. It's the only league with rules about the gender distribution on any given team, and is the least competitive (which is a bit misogynistic, if you ask me.) According to the Northwestern Intramural Captain's Manual, the Co-Rec league employs "altered rules to allow for fair competition and participation", which I think for floor hockey means that checking is restricted and there's no way to beat out an icing call. This is the league my floor hockey team is in.

Because of the nature of the league, only X+1 men are allowed on the court at any given time, where X is the number of women. If you've played in an intramural league, you might know how hard it is to get people in general to show up for games, and so if the people who don't show up happen to be women, it affects the number of players that can be on the court. I'm making a big deal out of this because it happened that while we were able to field a team, our competitors in the first round of the playoffs only had two girls show up. The upshot of this is that they were only allowed to have three guys on the court, and so we were kind of on a power play for the entire game.

So that was fun. I'd feel bad about that (and do, because they seemed to be frustrated that people that had signed up weren't showing up), but we had the same restriction and rules is rules, as someone who was a great philosopher of competition, but a less than stringent judge of proper grammar once said.

As a result, we played about ninety percent of the game in their end. Within the first few minutes of the game, Preeti rockets it into the net. 1-0. A few minutes later, the tone of the game becomes clear as I get it behind the net and get it to Steven at center, who takes advantage of the fact that he's more puck-cannon than human being.

2-0


Just a tinge.

We continue to knock it around in their end before Ben gets it at half court, unloads and earns himself a nickname.


That's right. Nicknames are now based on Comedy Central movies. 3-0

Before the first period is out, Steven comes up big again twice to put us up 5-0. I'd describe them for you, but the sheer force of the shots put into words might cause your computer to explode.

Second period comes and goes without much action. Kaibigan gets it down near Team Rich Ahn's goal a few times, but Meera channels Patrick Roy despite the fact that she doesn't know who that is and keeps them scoreless. I get the puck a few times right on their goalie and get tripped to improve our situation to 5-on-3, but can't seem to put it away, and the score remains 5-0 going into the third.

Third Period. Kaibigan's going to have to come out big if they want to pull off the win, but it's not like there isn't precedent for this kind of thing. More importantly, our hero (me) hasn't done much this game besides the one assist. Things are looking desperate. Then Steven knocks it down the boards and I finally figure out how to get around the goalie.


Top shelf. 6-0

Rest of the game goes without incident. Meera holds on to the shutout and Team Rich Ahn advances to the next round of the playoffs. I'd tell you who we're playing, but the bracket's sort of screwed up. We're playing better as a team, actually making good passes and can win games if we're a man up the entire damn time. I also discovered that if I bike to the game and barely make it, I'm somewhat tired. I shouldn't do that.

Stay tuned for your Team Rich Ahn Playoff news.