Hockey on Coffee or Blog

A Centimeter or Two

Fri, 13 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The blood on my hands didn’t register as blood at first.

I’d thrown my mask off after the shot. Reflex. Pain management. Give the jaw some air. The pain was sharp and then immediately dull, the kind that makes you think stinger before it makes you think anything else. So I knelt on the ice, head down, eyes on the white below me, and stayed there. A couple of guys skated over. Told them I was fine. Just a stinger. Give me a minute.

I believed that.

I stood up. Reached around to check on things. Brought my hands to my eyes.

They were covered in blood.

This is a shinny game. Eleven at night in Toronto, which is the only time you can get ice when you’re thirty-five and have kids and a job and a long list of reasons why you should probably be in bed. The guy who shot it was younger than the rest of us, wearing red, came in from the blue line on my right side and unloaded a hard wrist shot. I was dropping to make the save. The puck hit my shoulder on the way down, deflected hard, and found the gap between the bottom edge of my mask and the top of my neck guard.

I didn’t know that gap existed.

I’ve thought about that a lot since.

Once the blood started it didn’t stop. Someone handed me a towel. My friend swapped it for a wad of paper towels and I held it to my chin, to my neck, trying to figure out where exactly the problem was. He offered another wad a few minutes later. I replaced it and glanced briefly at the soaked one as it went in the trash.

Then the nausea hit, and someone said we should call 911, and I heard myself say that I was starting to feel light headed, and someone guided me to a bench.

What happened next is the part I’ve been glossing over for two years.

My hands went numb. Then my feet. Then they started to clench, fingers curling inward like something was pulling them closed. I slumped right. The feeling left my face. Then the right side of my body. I remember someone to my left trying to make sure I stayed conscious, talking at me, keeping me present. I remember paramedics removing my pads and skates while I sat there. I remember my vision blurring. I remember the questions getting harder to answer and then, for a while, not a lot else.

I know I got onto a stretcher. I don’t remember getting onto it. I know it was cold outside, Toronto in winter, and I remember the bumps of the path to the ambulance because it had snowed. I remember the lights inside the ambulance and the sound of the sirens and the medics figuring out which hospital could take me fastest. I remember one of them going through my wallet for my health card and either not finding it or deciding I was declining too fast to stop. Both seemed possible at the time.

The ER doctor stitched me up and told me, while her hands were still in my neck, that whatever hit me was a centimeter or two from being fatal. Then she said she was going to call her son when she was done. He was around my age. Played hockey. She wanted to make sure he was ok.

In the moment that was nothing. I was wearing hockey pants and a cartoon mummy wrap of tape and gauze, paying a forty-five dollar ambulance transfer fee, trying to find the cut with a selfie while waiting for a nurse. The cut was gaping — wound edges pulled wide apart, the kind that doesn’t close on its own — and even then it was hard to find in my beard. My brain was somewhere between shock and an unusual species of relief. I got stitched. Got discharged. My in-law picked me up outside a hospital I’d never been to, on a street I didn’t recognize.

The part that landed later, once I’d told the story enough times to hear it out loud, was this: she finished her shift, went home, and called her son. Not because anything happened to him. Because something almost happened to me, a stranger, and she needed to hear his voice. That’s how close it was. Close enough that a doctor who sees bad nights for a living went home and made that call.

The helmet is still in my bag. Still perfectly usable. The puck found a gap the equipment didn’t account for, and the equipment came through fine.

I added a dangler after. A promise to my wife. Safer.

It took me three weeks to get back on the ice and when I did, I was afraid of the right circle. Every time someone loaded up to shoot, my mouth hung open like it was waiting for something to happen. I couldn’t stop it. It took a while for that to go away.

My friend waited up that night. I texted him from the parking lot at 1:30 that I was at my car. He was relieved. I drove to his place and we stood outside in the cold and dark and he told me about what happened after I left. Apparently nobody wanted to shoot on the other goalie for the rest of the game. They cut it short and went home. We stood there laughing about that, me in my skate shoes and stitches, him shaking his head at how quickly I’d gone from fine to gone and then somehow back to standing in his driveway at two in the morning looking more or less like a normal person.

That’s the part that’s genuinely hard to sit with.

I was holding my own neck on that bench. Applying pressure to stop the bleeding. There is a version of that night where I apply too much pressure, stop the blood to my own brain, and become a hockey fatality. A freak accident statistic at an eleven o’clock shinny game. A number in a report somewhere. The young guy in red spends years carrying a shot he didn’t do anything wrong on. My wife gets a phone call instead of a sleepy conversation in the dark.

That version isn’t hypothetical. It was the same night, the same bench, the same hands.

I don’t live with pain from this. No lasting damage, no real reminder except a scar that hides in my beard. I got out clean and drove myself home at two in the morning like it was nothing. Then I walked in the door and woke up my wife.

She wanted to know I was ok. Then she wanted to know why I forgot to wear the right equipment, why I’d taken the car and left her stranded, how we were going to make sure this never happened again. All fair questions. The last one doesn’t really have an answer. When she’d run out of things to be furious about, she told me to wash up and come to bed. She’d look at the stitches in the morning.

I’ve told the gory part of this story plenty. Got cut playing hockey, here’s the bloody equipment. I’ve told it like it’s a war story, something to pull out for shock value.

That’s not what it is.

I was the lucky one. The gap was there the whole time. I just didn’t know it until the puck found it.

Some Nights You Just Show Up

Sun, 18 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Easy save. I could smother it, kill the play. Instead I kick it out to their other forward.

Not a mistake. A choice. I’m bored and my team’s up four goals and I want to make another save. So I manufacture chaos, create my own work, turn an easy night into something that feels like hockey.

That’s the first thirty-six minutes.

The second half, I’m making four saves in a row and watching the fifth one trickle past my pad anyway. My defense is skating like they’re underwater. Passes are dying on sticks. I’m doing everything right and we’re getting shelled.

Here’s the thing about being on-call: some weeks, everything you touch works. You’re rolling back that bad deploy before anyone notices. You’re catching the disk space issue at 87% instead of 99%. You’re so dialed in you start getting cocky, maybe let a minor alert sit an extra minute just to see if it self-heals, because you know you can fix it anyway.

Other weeks, you’re making all the right calls and it doesn’t matter. The primary fails over cleanly and the secondary’s already degraded. You catch the memory leak but the restart triggers a cascade. You did the runbook perfectly and the system finds a new way to fail anyway.

Both are the job.

The dangerous part is thinking the first kind of week means you’re great at this, or the second kind means you’re not. Some nights the puck just goes in. Some nights your coverage is perfect and it still finds the gap. The only consistent thing is that you have to show up.

You can’t manufacture chaos in production the way I do on ice - that’s how you end up in a post-mortem explaining why you thought it would be “fun” to test failover during peak traffic. But you also can’t let the brutal weeks convince you that you’re not doing it right.

The shinny game is rec league hockey at eleven PM with a bunch of tired old men. Nobody’s keeping score except me. The second half, we lost 8-2.

In production, someone’s always keeping score. But the principle holds: some nights you just show up, make the saves you can make, and skate off when it’s done.

The job is to show up anyway.

Everything I learned about Ops, I learned playing goal

Thu, 06 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Well, maybe not everything.

Look, being a goalie is objectively ridiculous. You strap on forty pounds of equipment designed to protect you from frozen rubber traveling at speeds that would make physicists frown. Then you stand in front of a net and dare people to shoot at you. It’s a strange job.

But here’s the thing: being a goalie is basically the same job as running ops, or security, or honestly, any part of software development where you’re the one who has to keep the thing from breaking.

Both jobs share the same core truth that nobody tells you in the job description: when everything’s working, no one notices you’re there. But the second something gets past you? Everyone knows exactly where you were and what you should have done differently.

You spend most of your time reading patterns, anticipating problems before they fully materialize, and communicating with people who may or may not be listening. You’re simultaneously trying to follow the systems that keep you consistent while also staying loose enough to react when something weird happens. Because something weird always happens.

And whether it’s a breakaway in overtime or a production incident at 2 AM, you learn pretty quickly that freezing up isn’t an option. You make the save or you don’t. You stop the breach or you don’t. Then you’ve got about eight seconds to shake it off and get ready for the next shot, because there’s always a next shot.

The bad news? You can’t stop everything. The good news? Neither can anyone else. The job is to be ready anyway.

Goalie as a Service

Wed, 19 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I remember the moment vividly—a hard shot struck the lower side of my mask. The impact was sharp, a bolt of pain radiating through my face. I dropped my head to the ice, letting the sting settle before pushing myself up onto my knees. It wasn’t until I stretched my neck, looking around, that the blood started flowing. When I glanced down, the realization hit—red pooling rapidly beneath me. Instinct took over. I stripped off my blocker, glove, and helmet, heading straight for the dressing room. Players were already scrambling for medical supplies as I pressed a hand to my face, trying to assess the damage and scrambling to find the source of the blood.

In that moment, I wasn’t thinking about the pain. I was thinking about getting back on my feet, assessing the damage, and figuring out my next move—just like in an on-call incident.

Being an amateur hockey goalie mirrors the world of DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) in ways that only those who’ve been through the chaos can truly appreciate. Both demand the ability to anticipate disasters, react with composure under pressure, and recover quickly when everything goes sideways. A goalie can’t afford to dwell on the last goal any more than an SRE can get stuck in post-mortem blame. The job is about resilience, adaptability, and learning from every incident—whether it’s a slapshot to the mask or a production outage at peak traffic.