WE'D HAD DREAMS of winning the 2008 U.S. Pond Hockey Championships, but now we just wanted to live. It was January in Minneapolis, 8:30 A.M. on a Friday, and the windchill was hovering at 17 below, with a sharp breeze sending snow dust billowing over the surface of the frozen lake.

The cold was actually the least of our problems. We were playing the first of a terrifying roster of teams, including, in our second game, last year's champions, a group of hardened locals called the Wiskey Bandits. They were supposed to be the Whiskey Bandits; rumor had it they were drunk when they'd signed up. One of my teammates, Pete Stoddart, lives near Minneapolis and had heard a lot about the Bandits. He described their strengths this way: "The thing about them is that they are young and they are talented."

So we had that to look forward to. At the moment, though, we were standing on the ice, eyeing our first opponents. They were called the Jets, and they were a group of friends from Winnipeg, Manitoba. We were in the open division, and you never quite knew who was going to show up. There were also divisions for seniors, women, and more casual players. The Jets looked serious, with matching jerseys and black helmets.

The only thing that matched about us was the six green practice jerseys I'd ordered on­line the week before. We called ourselves the Green Mountain Boys, because four of us play in Vermont. We're all in our thirties and forties, and this was our first time competing together in a real tournament. It would have been nice to draw one of the other duffer teams from a non-hockey place like St. Louis or California, or maybe the Minnesota squad named Team Fat. But as with youth and talent, luck was not on our side. We also lacked size, speed, and, perhaps most important, experience.

Games were forming on 24 other rinks set up on the massive surface of Lake Nokomis, on the southern outskirts of Minneapolis. You could see the players in the distance—silhouettes gliding around, steam from their breath rising, the ice stretching out behind them toward trees half a mile away, the morning sun brilliant but useless.

On our rink, ice was forming on the goatee of my teammate Ian Bartrum. My four days of stubble, which I'd sprouted in a panic when I saw that it might go down to minus 20, was doing nothing against the cold. Clem Powers, another teammate, was taking a similar beating; his face was bright red. Peter Otto, the last of the Vermont four, stood still and quiet. He had good reason: He'd forgotten his stick. It was in his living room in Salem, Oregon, and he was holding Clem's backup stick, a wooden number Clem had scored used at a sale where they were going two for $12. Worse, Peter had dislocated his shoulder in a game three months ago and hadn't been playing.

The referee, a woman bundled in infinite layers, called us over and explained the rules. We listened carefully.

"Na wanna, ha na," she said, then added, "ony been go …Aye aye?"

That was the gist of it. It was hard to hear her through her scarf, which was wrapped over her balaclava, which was covered by her hood, but we nodded anyway. Pond hockey doesn't really have any rules, other than teams of four try to put the puck in the goal, a six-foot-wide wooden box that's only four inches tall and lies flat against the ice, with two foot-long slots on the front, one on each end, where you can sneak in a shot. You can't score from more than halfway across the ice, and you can't stand in front of the goal. If there's a dispute, the ref is likely to yell something like "It's pond hockey, boys! You figure it out!"