Less than two weeks ago, my oldest nephew played in his last ice hockey game.After losing in the first round of college playoff games, he learned he may need another surgery, so he made the difficult decision to hang up his skates and retire.
Jack has been playing hockey since he was three years old. He’s about to turn 25 at the end of this month. His life was hockey — from mini mites to junior hockey to college hockey at two different schools — so this was a very bittersweet ending.
At the same time Jack was retiring from hockey, my youngest, who had hung up his stick three years ago, decided to come out of retirement and play one more year of lacrosse to close out his high school career with another varsity letter.
This is the text he sent the coach announcing his return. No words, just this meme:
Funny, clever, and maybe even a little arrogant to draw a comparison to MJ, but O knows the coach well and knew he’d get the reference and appreciate the meme.
The irony is that O started out wearing #45 his freshman year — the last year he played lacrosse for that same coach — but switched to #4 when the new jerseys came in.
O started playing lacrosse when he was about five or six years old. He played rec league every spring and travel occasionally in the summer. He even started on the middle school and JV high school teams as an attack. He was good, but he didn’t love it the way his older brother, now a college lacrosse player, did. (Although, he did use lacrosse as an excuse to get out of Confirmation early — don’t judge!) He hung up his stick after his freshman year of high school.
So what brought O out of retirement? I’m not entirely sure, but I think it was mostly peer pressure … The good kind.
Most of the seniors on the high school team are boys he’s played with since he started. For the past three years, they’ve been gassing him up, encouraging him to play again so they can all finish together, just like how they started.
Maybe it’s because the reality of high school ending in a few months has finally hit him, or maybe it’s because he didn’t want to run track again. Whatever the reason, all that gassing finally worked.
So here we are, entering the last three months of his senior year of high school. After a three-year hiatus, O is back on the lacrosse field with his friends, and that means, I, too, am back on the lacrosse field — or more accurately, in the bleachers, cheering. (Cue my social anxiety!)
O’s lacrosse game may be a little rusty (he hasn’t picked up a stick in three years, after all), but his trash talking game isn’t. Remembering his Long Island roots, he’s already (jokingly) drawing comparisons between him and big brother Henry and another famous Rockville Centre set of lacrosse brothers, the Kavanaghs.
The kid’s got confidence, that’s for sure. But even if he sucks, I’ll still be there, cheering him on — just maybe not as loudly, if I’m being honest. Because soon enough, it really will be his last game, and that will be bittersweet moment.
— LJDT
