By Hans Eisenbes

What exactly makes a boy want to be a goaltender? Beyond the cool equipment, it is a defensive streak in his personality, a passive disposition that prefers to have the world come to him. He sweeps his porch waiting for rude guests to arrive – they’ll be here anytime.

Even though off the ice he might be an unassertive, introspective kid, he sometimes shows a pugnacious side in the net, taking a swing with his paddled stick at the ankles of an opposing forward who’s always standing at the top of the crease. His crease.

A goalie has the idea that he is the last defense, like someone who is trusted with the job of protecting a great jewel or treasure. He must be steady and reliable as a banker. And yet every goalie fails in almost every game. There is no way to sugarcoat this: It’s a masochistic position, a crazy-making one. A goalie must somehow accept recurring failure and pretend it’s not there, the way a person watching a play or a movie must suspend his disbelief.

A goalie is like a knight in leather armor, but one that will give his life over and over again – one goal here, another goal there. It’s a kind of torture. He will be lightly sauteed one period at a time until he chooses never to do it again and buys a pair of normal skates to play pond hockey into his old age. You’ll recognize him by his t-stops, but he won’t moralize like a retired referee.

A goalie learns to dissociate from his body. His mind watches in disbelief as his body reacts correctly but not in time to stop a deflected shot low on the glove side. A goalie sees that luck – both good and bad – comes in streaks. A bad game or practice is not possible to reverse. Only getting off the rink and into bed can reset luck, but don’t count on it. In spite of what you may have heard coaches or parents say, self-confidence has nothing to do with it. Deluded and essentially crazy, goalies have no use for self-confidence; they gave that up in the second year of Squirts as a distraction.

A bad game has a kind of momentum that is horrifying to watch from behind a goalie mask. Nothing goes right. Things go from bad to worse. There seems to be a massive hole in the middle of your catching mitt that gets bigger each time the puck crosses the red line. Your pads feel clumsy as Mighty Mites clinging to your legs. You remember the old joke about the goalie who felt so depressed that he tried to commit suicide on the railroad tracks, but the train slipped through his five hole. A bad game drags on, and a good game drags on, and a good game is always on the brink of becoming a bad game, never the other way around.

A goalie is an obsessive clock-watcher, though he tries to be discreet about it because he’s supposed to be calmly enjoying this whole cruel deal.  Each second is a torture, each minute an emotional rollercoaster as the third period grinds on. The anxiety is exquisite and nauseating.

An allowed goal relieves a small amount of pressure – the inevitable horror has finally happened, like when a junker car finally breaks down and there’s nothing to do but call the tow truck. Blame is assigned. The goalie must find some way to assign the failure to something outside of his personal control,  such as unfair circumstances, a serial breakdown of the defense, a fluke redirection, a bad bounce off the boards, slow ice, fast ice, skates that are too dull, skates that are not dull enough, the wrong pair of socks.

A goalie is a supreme egoist. He loves and hates himself extravagantly, while skaters only love themselves in an innocent way. For a skater, each shot is an opportunity to win. For a goalie each shot is an opportunity to lose. To suck.

No one on his team will say a bad word about him – at least not in public – because they know the goalie has already thought this, and much worse, about himself. A goalie keeps to himself and is least likely to be a “team player” though, of course, the team relies on him. No one can really help him do his job, and if they do – a defenseman in the crease clearing the puck from the mouth of an open goal – where is the goalie? He is sprawled on the ice well away from where he should be, thanks to a bad bounce, a misplayed puck, a needle-threading backdoor pass, a rebound high over his shoulder – when this defenseman clears the puck and the team and the small group of parents in the bleachers hoot with relief, everyone knows that the goalie has failed and the D-man has bailed him out, and the D-man is an excellent and virtuous person who has saved the game.

A goalie is celebrated after a shutout, but the score rarely tells much of the story. For example, a goalie plays his varsity game against, say, Owatonna. He is standing on his head. His body moves with grace and precision though he is small for a goalie. To him the puck looks huge, and his gloves are like black holes from which even light can’t escape, each rebound seems to steer itself to the corner as if drawn there by gravity itself. For maybe the first and last time in his playing career, time doesn’t exist for the goalie for a stretch of about five minutes some time during back-to-back penalty kills in the second period.

The game ends and his teammates – bearded juniors and seniors who have never even said “hi” before – are slapping the sophomore’s pads. A captain puts the game puck in his mit and slaps his rear with the blade of his stick. The small goalie has made an incredible 70 saves on 74 shots, but the team has lost 4-1.

The goalie feels great about his game because so many other people do, and they say so. He doesn’t remember anything specific about the game, no particular saves. It’s like he wasn’t even there except as a machine with finely tuned reflexes doing precisely what they were supposed to do. The goalie has only a vague feeling of having been in some kind of zone where he never had to remind himself about all the rules and processes and reactions – square to the puck, cut the angle, trap the rebound, cover or corner – his body simply did it.

On the long cold ride home in the school bus with frosted-over windows, he recalls the words of a goalie coach at summer hockey camp when he was a PeeWee: Any goalie who lets four goals in has lost the game, regardless of the final score.

It’s a hell of a way to live.

Hans Eisenbeis was a stand-up goalie for Mankato West when Ronald Reagan was president of the USA, David Lee Roth was the singer of Van Halen (the first time) and hockey players were all “he.”