The Hockey Hymn

On Sundays we go off to church
On a pond among the sapling birch
There ain't no pews and there ain't no choir
Ain't no steeple, ain't no spire
But the people gather just the same
And they play that holy hockey game
Cuz it don't take piety or prayers
TO leave behind our earthly cares...

There's no collection plate to pass
On a frozen pond as smooth as glass
But the way we pass that puck around
You'd swear we all were glory-bound
And when the score is tied at ten
We don't sing and we don't say amen
We just bow and catch our breath and then
We drop the puck, and play again...

We've all got deeply-held beliefs
In the Habs, the Sens and the Maple Leafs
canucks the Oilers and the Flames
And that God loves to watch hockey games
Sun gets low, we lift a drink
And we praise the lord of the hockey rink
And the shadows of the silver birch
They say we've spent
The whole damned day... in church...


This song was partly inspired by a morning skate on Ian Tamblyn's carefully tended hockey pond, but also by the pond my sister and I and the boy up the road used to skate on, along Murray Point Road near Nobel, Ontario.

There's a neat story about this song here