AT THE USPHC, strange uniforms were common. There was a team called the Party Posse that had taped extra-tall party hats with streamers to their helmets. There were Maxwell's Demons, made up of grad students from the University of Minnesota. "Maxwell's Demon," they explained, was a thought experiment in thermodynamics proposed by Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell. Never mind the details. The team wore matching tweed jackets with numbers sewn on back. They didn't look like they'd played since childhood. There was also a team in red-and-black flannel hunting jackets. They were pretty good.

On Saturday morning, with the temperature at minus 14, we played our third game against the KARE-11 All-Stars, a group made up of employees from a local television station. They wore plain white uniforms, and some of them were in their forties. Like us, they'd lost their first two games, and we thought we just might take them. We played well and led 6–2 early in the second period. But we got greedy for more goals and forgot to keep a guy back on defense. The All-Stars put in seven quick goals before we came to our senses, and then, in the last minute, with the game tied 10–10, they scored off a long pass.

That afternoon, the Wiskey Bandits creamed us, racking up ten goals in the first half and eliminating us from the tournament. Still, I managed an impressive goal. About two minutes into the second half, I took a pass from Peter Otto and, as two Bandits closed in on me, cut right and took a long wrist shot. It sailed into the little opening some 50 feet away. We were too tired and overwhelmed to really celebrate.

After the game, we were in dire need of an ego-salving beer. There were three taps in the tent, with women in referee jerseys pouring a very tasty local ale, and the brews powered our upbeat postgame analysis: If we had stuck to the 1-2-1 formation, we all agreed, we could have beaten those newscasters. But nobody at this event took their losses too hard, as I discovered when I bumped into a friend of a friend from New York.

"How did you do?" I asked.

"We lost," he said, brightly. "To Phil Housley!"

A little later, a team of Canadians found a spot next to us. They had won the 2007–08 Canadian championships, and Haberman had invited them down as special guests. One of them, a buzz-cut thirty-something named Tighe, started chatting with Ian about the high quality of play here at the U.S. championships. A few minutes later, Tighe looked at his watch and said, "Game time. Gotta go." He took out his upper front teeth, put them in a special box, stowed the box in his bag, and clomped out on his skates.