A Late-Night Small Tragedy in Minor Key (with Zamboni Accompaniment) - David Foster Wallace

If you’ve never been to Southgate Arena at 9:30 p.m. on a Monday—the calendrical equivalent of a sigh—picture a municipal refrigerator whose compressor has entered that phase of middle age where it overcompensates for perceived inefficiency. Add to this scene two beer-league teams whose collective relationship to the standings is roughly that of barnacles to the hull of a slowly sinking ship, and you have the raw material of the Ford Hockey League’s late-night final: Galaxies (1–7–2) vs. Edsels (also residing in hockey’s lower tax brackets).

The Edsels’ first two goals are not accidents, nor “puck luck,” nor the hockey equivalent of found money. They are clean, competent executions—the kind of goals that suggest some players warm up before games or have possibly read literature on defensive-zone tactics. Still, they’re helped along by the Galaxies’ familiar brand of coverage, which veers between “philosophical” and “aspirational.” 2–0 Edsels, and the Galaxies look briefly like a group of men reconsidering all their life choices since dinner.

Then, a twist: the Galaxies tie it at 2–2, producing a sudden, brittle optimism in the arena—like someone cracking open a glow stick to see if it still works after three years in a junk drawer. For a fleeting moment, gravity seems negotiable.

Gravity, however, negotiates nothing. The Edsels strike twice more, reasserting the basic physics of the situation. 4–2, and the Galaxies’ bench emits the collective exhalation of people who know this plotline intimately and have pre-written emotional responses for it.

But the third period introduces a minor heroic stanza. Gates and Alderman—whose style can be summarized as “hard hats optional but assumed”—manufacture a goal the way most beer-leaguers manufacture postgame alibis: through persistence, friction, and selective memory. Gates's feed, Alderman’s tip, 4–3, and the Galaxies are back within one.

The final minutes bloom into a sort of frantic sincerity. Goalie pulled, six attackers swirling, passes firing through seams that were theoretical at best. Contreraz, in the Edsels net, chooses this moment to reveal the version of himself that is immune to late-night narrative drama. Shots are stopped, scrambles diffused, hope managed. Time sputters out. Final score: 4–3 Edsels.

And then there is Jim Tassis’s first penalty of the season. A roughing call in the offensive zone—absolutely the correct call, indisputably earned, and timed with an almost philosophical disregard for context. Nothing precipitated it. There was no retaliation, no scrum, no heat-of-the-moment fracas. Merely Tassis, making an unprompted decision to investigate the boundaries of interpersonal contact in a part of the ice where no danger or drama had existed. If the Edsels’ goals were the product of skill, this was the product of pure, distilled whim.

Still: it puts him on the scoresheet.

The Galaxies now face two more 9:30 p.m. games in 2025, including one during Christmas week—an act of scheduling cruelty that suggests someone in league operations either dislikes festive joy or assumes FHL players celebrate the holidays exclusively by napping.

Whether holiday cheer will manifest in these late-night odysseys remains to be seen. In the FHL, hope is measured not in the standings but in the quiet, stubborn fact of showing up again. And the Galaxies will. Because in beer-league hockey, arrival—cold, tired, doubtful—is its own small, absurd form of transcendence.