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at least a skin of ice by Thanksgiving—hockey was not popular in our part of the state. In northern Minnesota boys laced up their skates and grabbed a stick as soon as they could walk, but in Willow Falls the big sports were baseball, football, and basketball, as well as hunting and fishing. Dummett’s Hardware sold pucks, sticks, and skates, but there were no school or amateur hockey programs, and no public ice was maintained for the sport. A few kids whacked a puck around on one of the public rinks from time to time, but until Dr. Dunbar came to town there were never hockey games. He had played hockey in high school and college, he loved the sport, and he wasn’t about to give it up just because the residents of our town had wobbly ankles and didn’t know a hip check from a glove save.
    Every year then, once the cold weather came to stay, Dr. Dunbar converted a carefully measured section of their big backyard into a skating rink. And while the children in Willow Falls were welcome to use the rink to practice figure eights or to play crack-the-whip during the week, on weekends the ice was reserved for hockey games. You had to be at least high school age to play, and over the years a few men became passable players—usually enough, anyway, for two full teams.
    When Johnny and I were growing up, Dr. Dunbar provided us with plenty of instruction on the ice. But until we came of age, we stood along the sidelines with the rest of the spectators—at least fifty people would often show up to watch the weekend games. Even when there was little chance we’d be invited to play, though, we always came prepared. We wore our skates, our supporters and cups (we called them “cans”), and we wrapped newspapers or magazines around our shins. Finally, when we were sixteen, we were allowed to take part in the competition.
    In truth, however, those pickup games were far more recreational than they were competitive. What would have landed a player in the penalty box in a real hockey game was likely to be accidental and followed by an apology on our rink. Body checks were more like the suggestion of what an actual check might be, and there was never an occasion when players were tempted to throw down their gloves and square off. And Dr. Dunbar and the Burrows brothers, Stan and Don, were the only players who wore hockey gloves or pads. More often than not, Dr. Dunbar also wore his old Wolverines jersey. The rest of us were out there in wool mackinaws, sweatshirts, and mittens. No one wore a helmet or a mask, but back then very few professional players did either.
    The Burrows brothers were pretty fair hockey players. They’d grown up in Grand Forks, North Dakota, and played in high school. Red Rayner was from Warroad, Minnesota, and he could play, too. A few more men had some hockey in their past, and still others developed a few skills just from playing over the years, but Dr. Dunbar was indisputably the best player. Born and raised in northern Michigan, he attended the University of Michigan on a hockey scholarship, and though he had an opportunity to play junior-league hockey after graduation, by then he had decided on a career in medicine.
    Every time he laced up his skates, though, his talent and skill returned, and his superiority to every other player was apparent. He skated backward faster than most of us could move forward, and he handled the puck as dexterously as the rest of us might flip a coin and pass it from hand to hand. On the ice he had agility and grace that would have been astonishing if you only saw him sitting behind his desk in a suit. And if you were lucky enough to be on his team, your game improved instantly. He’d pass the puck to you in such a way that it didn’t even seem as if you had to catch it; it would simply land on your stick at exactly the instant when it had to be there. And with what seemed to be little more than a flick of the wrist, his shots on goal flew from his stick as if the puck were