The puck bounces

“My barn having burned down, I can now see the moon.”

– Mizuta Misahide

Quite a beautiful attitude, isn’t it? The picture of the resilient spirit. I could only aspire to such things, as if my barn were burning, I would not be thinking of the view, nor breaking out the marshmallows. I’d more than probably be lamenting my poor fortune. My unlucky stinking bounce. Does crap actually come back to you? Surely the shoddy and shitty things that pass by us all don’t boomerang back around to us, do they? It only feels like it. The fecal matter may hit the fan, but does it actually bounce?

An old-school hockey fan might think so. Rumor has it that the first bouncy puck used in the early days of the game was actually made from carved frozen cow dung. How… creative. Wouldn’t you have wanted to watch the person who first tried it on for size? It not only slides like that, but it makes for one heck of a powerful and pungent fire starter for the after party. Oh, and no more bringing your sticks into the house after the game, please.

In hockey and in life, you really don’t want the crap bouncing back your way. To keep it from bouncing, today’s modern puck is vulcanized, a process which uses chemicals and heat to harden rubber. Pucks are also kept frozen to minimize the degree to which they actually bounce. A frozen puck will bounce a quarter to an eighth as much as their unfrozen cousins, and reducing the degree to which the “flat ball” rebounds has been a key to introducing consistency into the sport. But even with all those safeguards, the rubber puck will inevitably take a funny bounce, and sometimes that will work out in your favor. Sometimes…

Sometimes the bounce takes your game, your season, or your life in a very different direction. Sometimes the best bounce you can hope for is simply the resilience to bounce back.

A friend of mine I used to write and podcast with over at Denver Stiffs knows a little bit about resilience. Zach Mikash has always been one of the workhorse stalwarts of the site, making sure that the multitude of writing slots got filled, the shows kept going, and that the water got lifted for whatever it needed to be lifted for. Years ago, and unbeknownst to any of us at the site, Zach and his wife had also suffered a devastating loss, the stillborn arrival of their second child. Through pain I cannot imagine, Zach simply continued to do the work that needed to be done, eventually using the memory and story as a farewell piece that was one of my favorite pieces the site has ever published. Through circumstances and timing, Zach didn’t quite make the break from them for another couple of years, and wrote something equally powerful this last week in his second farewell. Along the way, he bounced back from that indescribable loss to learn and teach himself and his family about grief, loss, and death. He also gave some of that inspiration to the thousands of us reading along. Powerful stuff. There will inevitably be tough bounces, but you can bounce back. Way to bounce back, Mr. Mikash.

Speaking of cow-dung bounces, the Colorado Avalanche seem to have aggregated a lifetime of tough breaks into the first half of their 2020-21 season. Between bad bounces, injuries, and reconfiguration, the hometown hockey club has seen a couple of recent seasons of primarily positive breaks boomerang back with a vengeance. To wit:

Colorado barely salvaged one win out of their last two games to the outmatched Phoenix Coyotes, thoroughly outplaying them in both contests only to lose the first game due to whatever the hockey equivalent of facepalming is and squeak the second one out in overtime. This is not the first time the Avs had lost a game they would have looked to have won on the stat sheet.

They’ve also had the injury bug bite them hard, not only losing major games to some key players, but having every single player on the squad missing time due to injury a scant 24 games into the season. Fortunately, they seem to finally be healing up a bit with several back from injury and rounding back into form.

The breadth of those missing man-hours has also created a bit of a Swiss-cheese nature to the lineup cards and cohesion, as the adjustments to rotating lines, COVID-designed scheduling that leaves all teams playing twice per site in a 56-game sprint, and some unfortunate outcomes have left the team searching for an identity and a motor at times. The squad that was a couple of good bounces away from the Stanley Cup Finals last season has sputtered a bit out of the gates on several fronts, and is still looking for a few solutions in the latter half of the season to round back into playoff form.

Fortunately for these resilient Avalanche, they have watched their barn burn down in the first half of the season, with opportunities to see the moon clearly in the second half. They have already proven to bounce back well from adversity this year, primarily following losses with wins, having only dropped two games in a row twice, following up their six other losses with victories. That ability to absorb the tough bounces and bounce back has been a hidden jewel of their evolving season. Overturning adversity quickly will be handy by the time their season has turned into single-elimination contests.

The funny thing about resilience is it’s a trait you can only pick up by picking yourself back up. There’s no way to practice for it. No test to take take in advance, no vaccine to inoculate yourself. You become resilient by weathering the storms that inevitably come, and only coming back stronger. Learning the lessons that come from that adversity instead of ignoring them. The troubles and tough breaks that have bedeviled the team so far seem to have been a bit of a trial by fire. Will that heat produce a vulcanized version of the Avalanche when the games truly start to count? Bad bounces will only keep coming for so long. How will this resilient team bounce back?