In the mid-Fifties Buffalo, New York, was a hockey town. The closest big-league baseball team was Cleveland, about 240 miles away. The closest big-league football team was, well, Cleveland. If you wanted to travel an another sixty miles in another direction I suppose you could count Pittsburgh. To be fair, there wasn’t a big-league hockey team in Buffalo either, but, somehow, that didn’t matter. The American Hockey League was almost big-league. The NHL All-Stars would come in to play the Buffalo Bisons every once in a while, depending on where they finished in the standings. The Buffalo Bisons baseball team was in the Cleveland farm system, but I didn’t find that out until much later. Maybe it was the proximity to Canada that made it a hockey town, or maybe it was just the lake-effect weather that battered everybody into that dig-it-out-of-the-corner, hip-check mentality.

Our house shared a large area in back with our neighbors to either side and the neighbors on another street that ran parallel to ours. If you stood on our back patio and looked across the way to the backs of the houses that faced the other street, you could see fences and hedges put up to delineate each family’s little slice of paradise. It was a newish working neighborhood in a little suburb called Snyder. The fences and the hedges seemed small, even to me, a small enough kid who was just beginning to awaken to the fact that there was a bigger world just out the back door.

Out that door, across a big expanse of lawn and just to the right a little was my friend Bob’s house. His family was Canadian, which seemed exotic to me. I’m not sure I knew what a Canadian was. It didn’t matter. What did matter was that right after the first “real” snow, Howard, Bob’s dad, built a little snow levee around his back yard, just inside the hedge. The last task of that year for the garden hose was to flood the yard inside the snow levee evenly and completely. It took about a week of watering for a smooth expanse of ice to develop. I watched curiously. When I asked Bob what it was all about, he looked at me knowingly and said, “Hockey.” I nodded back just as knowingly and said, “Oh. Hockey.” Bob, at five, was a year older and I instinctively envied his worldliness. So, I stayed quiet and waited.