A part of hockey’s lure has to be in the equipment. There’s something magical in the ritual of putting on all that gear that looks nothing like anything in the real world. Nothing.

Gloves are so padded that when the players do the now-ubiquitous gloved hand-clap to thank the fans after a game, it looks bizarre, unnatural. Same goes for the helmet, the socks (yeah, right), and the pants.

When I was four years old, following my father to hockey games in Helsinki, I was fascinated by goalies who, to me, looked like freaks of nature. I mean, where did these people live? I had never seen such creatures - with their wide legs, their chubby upper bodies, and their big, blocky hands - out on the streets.



One time, I asked my father about it and he told me that the players wore equipment when playing.

The next day, he made me a goalie mask out of cardboard and sprayed it black. That was the first of many goalie masks he made me. Until I started playing hockey for real, and wouldn’t ever play in goal.

The equipment is a personal thing. I wore the same elbow pads from Junior C all the way through to men’s league, until I got my buddy’s old ones. They were way too stiff, like playing with a cast on my arm, but when they got broken in, and became mine, they were mine. I got them in 1993, and they’re the ones in my hockey bag in the basement.

When I got my first real skates for Christmas, I was so happy that I jumped up and hugged my best friend, and whispered the news into his ear: “Riku, I got new skates.” They were red and black CCM Marksmans, and Riku, our German shephard, looked really happy, too.

But what really makes the hockey armor complete, the one thing that’s truly special - for a skater - are the pants. If you’ve ever seen a player come out and strut around the arena wearing only his hockey pants, you know what I’m talking about.

Even if they look like clowns, they still look like cool clowns.

It was the sweater tucked into the pants that made the Gretzky look complete. It was the pants that were two sizes too big and hung below his kneecaps that was the Bengt-Åke Gustafsson - the current Team Sweden head coach and former Washington Capital - trademark.

And it was the thin red line inside the wider white stripe on the sides of the blue HIFK pants that made Matti Hagman look so good - so special when he celebrated goals by lifting his skate and pumping his fist like he was pulling a lever on the side of his pants - back in the late 1970s.

My blue pants didn’t have that red stripe. But mine did have the perfect Koho diamond pattern and blue was a great color for somebody who played on two teams and sometimes had two games on the same Saturday. Buying those pants was what made me a hockey player. You can skate around, you can have good moves, you can have the coolest helmet, shiniest skates, but if you have nowhere to hide your jock strap, you’re not a real hockey player.

I didn’t know I was going to become a hockey player when my parents and I drove to the Maximarket in Helsinki. We walked down to the sporting goods department, and looked around. My father, the hockey player, found the pair and asked me to try it on.

Had the store allowed German shephards inside, I probably would have hugged Riku and whispered something into his big ears, because I fell in love with the pants. So we bought them and I wore them around the apartment, bumping into things, just to show my parents how well they protected me.

But who was I kidding? Protection? No, what was important was that my armor was complete. I was one of them. I was a hockey player.