What's your own history??

If you're interested in any sort of history like me you tend to look at yourself and your own life with a historical perspective from time-to-time.

With the help of my dad I recently moved my home office down to a room in my basement. This was preceded by a necessary cleaning up, purging and rearranging of a lot of "stuff" in the basement---much of which was personally historical. Some things FINALLY got tossed. When you hit your mid-40's the question of 'why in the world are you keeping this????' has sunk in on at least a few items. Too much was kept but at least the minutia level is down.

One of the cherished relics I came across was the late 90's hockey trophy my team won partly thanks to my winning shootout goal. I was given the trophy but it somehow ended up in my friend Ned's hands, one of our great defensemen. A couple years ago he surprised me with it when he and his wife came over one weekend evening---that about made my year to that point. I'd thought it long gone.

This piece is very special to me and I miss those hockey days. Like the happy, conquering knuckleheads we were after winning that championship we headed to the nearest watering hole that Sunday night and "drank from the chalice" of this trophy since, you know, that's what the champions of the NHL do every year when they win it all. There's a golden plastic cup in the middle of this trophy at the base that we filled up with refreshment and guzzled from and passed and guzzled from and passed.

It didn't work too well because to get our nastly mouths around it we had to press our head in between the trophy's supports and the low-domed upper platform of it to accomplish celebratory consumption. Worth it though!

And yes we skated around the rink with it for a few minutes before heading to said watering hole as well.

That winning goal was something to me. Hearing our small number of fans screaming and seeing the reaction of my team after I scored that goal will remain emblazened in my brain for as long as I'll live. We'd never won anything in hockey up to that point so this was pretty huge for all of us.

But hey, there was a lot more I came across in the basement...I'll share as time guzzles on...