February 28th

In my last blog I talked about how on February 28th Canada made Olympic history by winning fourteen gold medals. It had all come down to the men's hockey finals. A game with so much on the line for Canada and the United States respectfully. Canada needed the win to redeem themselves from their previous loss, and to prove to the world that hockey is our game. The States needed the win to prove to the critics that beating Canada wasn't a fluke and that they are indeed a force in the hockey world. Now, on to my journey of how I was able to see the game winning goal. As you may of already known, I was scheduled to have a practice at six pm that sunday night in Etobicoke, and the game had started at 3 something. This posed a huge deleima for me and my teamates. Some decided that they would get to practice so early, they could see the entire game at Jack Astor's. Well some friends and I decided to watch the first period at home and then make the long commute to practice together and make it in time to see the end of the game. We listened to the car radio the entire way up, and we were devastated when we heard that the US had scored to tie the game with under a minute left in regulation. At this point we had just entered Etobicoke and we were desperate to find the Jack Astor's where our friends were, but all we had was an address and no map. We managed to find the right street, but we went the wrong way for about 5 minutes before realising what we had done. We immediately turned around and began to break some rules of the road to ensure we made it on time. As we approached the restaurant, overtime had startedand we were desperately looking for a parking space. Ofcourse, we found one at the back of the parking lot and we had to make a run to the front doors. When we got inside, we made a "B" line for the bar area and breathed a sigh of relief as the game was still going on. Not more then a minute later, Crosby scored the game winner and the bar went into an uproar! It was a perfect end to a long journey.

First practice

Sunday February 28th was a very important day in Canadian history. We won our 14th gold medal of the 2010 winter Olympics in a jaw dropping Canada vs USA hockey game, one which I will talk about in another blog. This was the highlight of many people's day, but not mine. The highlight of my day game 20 minutes after the game ended, and lasted 4 hours. I am ofcourse talking about my first practice with my new team. At our practices, 4 teams come out to play, one in every division of the CXBL league. The coming together of these 4 teams creates what is called a paintball camp. The teams were Toronto Rage, the number one team in all of Ontario; Oshawa Fury, a consistent team that normaly finishes in the top five; Vaughan Vipers, a team being rebuilt from the ground up; and Brampton Rage Kids, a group of young paintballers just getting into the sport. At this practice, we created and got into our lines that we would be playing on throughout the year ( five players are on one line). Our practice consisted of running, stretching, some minor drils, but mainly scrimmaging against the all the other lines to see which ones were the strongest, and which ones needed some improvement. I was selected to play on the top line for the Oshawa Fury team, as well as some other super talented players that I've always admired. For the first 10 games or so that my line played, we played against lines from Vaughan and the two other lines from our team. We blasted those guys like it was nothing, we thought no one could stop us. But then for the next 5 or so games, we played against lines from Toronto. At first we thought we could hang with the big boys, but once we stepped on the field, they beat us so fast, we didn't even know what happened. But playing against better players always makes you a better player yourself, and for that I'm thankful that we got beat so bad because I learned a lot. Hopefully next practice I learn even more, and hey, we might even be able to beat those Toronto boys.

Until next time,

lilcutie38