FOR OUR SECOND GAME, we played Team Wood. They had matching helmets in a reflective yellow and wore weird-looking maroon pants.

"Those are Goldsworthy helmets," said Pete Stoddart. "And they've got Cooperalls!" The Goldsworthy helmet is a strange padded contraption that was worn by Bill Goldsworthy when he played in the seventies for the Minnesota North Stars. Cooperalls are full-length padded pants that were introduced, jeered at, and quickly retired sometime in the eighties; they remain the AMC Pacer of hockey, beloved for their awesome ineptitude.

Team Wood played angry. They were young and cocky and quick, and they muscled us off the puck, pounding dangerously hard shots down the center of the ice. The shots were dangerous because pond ice features hills and valleys and crevices. One puck hit a crack, popped up, and winged Ian in the shoulder, leaving a purple bruise. We lost something like 12–1.

After our drubbing, we filed off the ice, stunned. At the corner of the rink, we ran into a huge friendly-uncle type with a gray beard, glasses, and a fur-lined parka. "You guys just played the former high school state champions!" he told us, giggling. "That was the Holy Angels team. They won it all in 2002."

"Maybe we should play in Arizona next year," said Peter Otto.

"Or maybe there's a tournament in Belize," said Ian.

Back in the beer tent, the scene was one of Dickensian cheer, with guys in their base layers sharing stories about their games. There were many women, too; some were spectators and some were playing.

"I just love how the girls look in the cold, with their woolly hats and their hair all falling over their parkas and their flush faces," said Peter Otto, surveying it all.

In a way, Peter was the reason I was here. Along with Clem, Ian, and me, he's a regular at a New Year's Day game of pickup hockey that we've held with family and friends at a nameless pond in central Vermont for about 15 years. I remember, about nine years ago, watching Peter, who was skating at a good clip, lean down to scoop up a bouncing puck with his glove, and then drop it gently in front of his stick as he continued on. He did it with such ease that I had to learn how to do it, too. I'd skated a fair amount, but I'd never played organized hockey. So I started an apprenticeship of clinics and late-night games. Now my game is like Microsoft Windows: Usually it works all right, but from time to time there's a sudden, unexpected crash.

Our New Year's game waxes and wanes from about ten in the morning to nearly five, although we've gone later, with help from glowing pucks and spotlights. It's the highlight of my year, and I think of theirs, too. We talk about the previous game throughout the winter and spring. Around July 1, we start to talk about next year.

Pond hockey is similar to ice fishing in its ratio of convenience to reward. Prepping a pond can be grueling. In Vermont, for hours at a time, we've shoveled wet snow that weighed 15 pounds a scoop. We've spent days trying to figure out how to improve nature's ice. One of my cousins, Randy Leavitt, built a crude but highly effective Zamboni out of a 50-gallon drum. He laid it on a wheeled cart and attached a spigot to the back, which fed out to an old maple-syruping hose full of drilled holes. You'd fill the drum with water and skid it around on the ice.

But pond prep mainly means shoveling, so we understood exactly why the award granted to the winner of the U.S. Pond Hockey Championships is a gigantic golden shovel.