By RICHARD MCCARTHY
For the Gazette
There is a little pond on Old Farm Road in Amherst, about four-tenths of a mile from Old Farm’s intersection with Route 9. It is marked by an official printed sign that says “Gull Pond/Town of Amherst/Conservation Area.” There is also a homemade wooden sign beside it, with “Turtle Xing” painted on one side, “Go Slow” painted on the other side, and drawings of turtles on both sides.
In the warm weather months, you sometimes see a person or two fishing from the pond’s edge. In the winter, you might see a few skaters on a patch of ice they’ve shoveled off, and there might be enough of them with hockey sticks for a pick-up hockey game. At all times of the year, you could see someone observing its wildlife, which includes birds, beavers, and even otters.
One day in February 2021, there was a line of vehicles parked alongside the pond, a line the length of which I’d never seen there before. When I looked out on the pond, I saw that two fair sized skating areas had been shoveled off. On those two surfaces were skaters who, like the vehicles, I’d never seen the likes of at the pond before.
Usually a pick-up hockey game on Gull Pond, or any pond for that matter, has participants with a range of abilities. There are those who look like they’re not that far from being able to stand up on skates without falling to maybe some high school level players, with all levels of skill in between. I played a lot of hockey when I was younger, and I could tell with a quick read that the guys out there were way, way off the charts of typical pond hockey skill levels.
Who was out there were the players of the University of Massachusetts hockey team. They’d been closed down at their campus practice rink because of COVID-19 protocols at the university, but the players had met up unofficially. I could picture a few of the players acting as “scouts” to find ice, or perhaps already knowing about the pond, and putting the word out on whatever devices and platforms to “be there at 1.”
For the next three days they were indeed out there with their music blaring, loud enough to jack up their already high flying energy level, but not so loud as to be intrusive. The neighbors who I talked to about this sudden presence on our sleepy little pond had a twinkle of amusement, maybe even enchantment, in their eyes. It was sort of how I’d imagined they’d be if there was a movie location shoot in our neighborhood.
Since a few years after they’d taken their first steps on dry land, those players on our pond had had structured ice time, a lot of it involving “drills,” indoors, on manmade ice. They had stood out enough at each level of ability to be cherry-picked to be moved up to the next level. Now it was expected that in the next year or two or three, a number of them would be playing professional hockey, including some in the major league, the National Hockey League.
And there they were, out on their shoveled-off patches of ice, playing pick-up hockey, or “shinny,” as it is sometimes called, and having a ball. You could almost reach out and touch their joyous bond of shared communion with the ice. As I said, I was on ice for a good chunk of my youth, enough to believe that every hockey player develops a love affair with the ice, and that love affair is in its most ardent form on nature’s ice, in the cold open air, with borders of snow, and no walls or roof to box it in.
After three days on our pond, the COVID-19 protocols were changed at the university, and our unscripted neighborhood hockey team went back to their official status as the UMass hockey team, to their practices within the confines of their campus rink and their games played before the expectations of thousands.
Now here’s the kicker.
Before those players of the 2020-2021 University of Massachusetts hockey team took their retreat at Gull Pond, they had won 11 of 19 games. Their first game back after the pond, they played Providence College, with whom they had tied twice in two previous meetings that season. They beat Providence by 7 goals, and then they continued on to be unbeaten for the rest of the season. Their wins included all their games in the Hockey East Tournament and all their games in the Division I National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Tournament. Their final win was in the NCAA Championship game.
And when you win the National Championship game, you are the National Champions.
Hockey aficionados might offer a number of reasons why that team had such a dramatic midseason turnaround and won their first-ever national championship. I wouldn’t look to argue with any of them or any of their analytics. But having been there, I’ll forever believe that those young men’s “brief shining moment” on Gull Pond, sharing with each other the game and the ice in their purest forms, was right there at the heart of it all. A body plays a game, but so does a spirit.
And now Gull Pond has gone back to being mostly still again, except for its wildlife and those who quietly share it. Those three days of exhilaration and exultation on its ice are stored wherever it is such moments are kept. As for me, I think that maybe, along with the Gull Pond and Turtle Crossing signs, a third sign might be added, a sign that reads “Natural Home of National Champions.”