Let Them Have Hockey

The Minnesota State High School Boys Hockey Tournament is a week-long enterprise in St. Paul, Minnesota, in which metro suburban high schools collectively bus their homogeneity into this great great city of ours. Sometimes the teams come from Lakeville, or Eden Prairie, or Prior Lake; even the occasional Stillwater produces enough talent to surpass Hill-Murray and earn their ticket to the Xcel Energy Center.

The sheer volume and variety of high school hockey in Minnesota creates for an interesting and unpredictable tournament each year. In this age, however, there are a few aspects of the tournament that are very much guaranteed year after year. One guarantee is that the final tournament will be played in downtown St. Paul's Xcel Energy Center. And despite it being held here annually, the second guarantee is that none of the schools participating in Minnesota's beloved contest will actually hail from the City of St. Paul. Even Minneapolis' single team faces a slim-to-none chance of reaching the state tournament, and that achievement is only getting unlikelier as the years go by. The last time a city school (St. Paul or Minneapolis) made it to the Minnesota High School Boys Hockey Tournament was in 1995 (when I was a 0 year old). And as sad as it is, that year might also be the last.

Now, I am quite aware of St. Paul Academy's presence in this year's tournament. And no, I don't consider them, or any other private school of that nature a city school. When the majority of enrollment at schools like S.P.A. and C.D.H. are suburban children, they cannot be considered city schools by any means. These are suburban schools without boundaries. Actually, there is one boundary, and it's income-based. No matter the geography of your home, if you don't have enough money for tuition, then you live outside their boundaries. It's as simple as that.

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I played hockey for a city school in St. Paul from 2010 - 2013, and we never even made it close to the state tournament. But even if I was good enough to play for a championship-bound team like Hill-Murray, I would have played for my St. Paul school a thousand times before anyone else. I have too much pride in my neighborhood to outsource myself. As a hockey player for a city school, you become part of a small group of people that experience two very different sides of Minnesotan culture at once. And as odd as it sounds, no day more perfectly illustrates this nuance than the day I went on a field trip to McDonald's in 2012.

It was late November, and I was along to help chaperon and document a field trip for the English-Language-Learners at my high school, St. Paul Como Park. The first stop was McDonald's, and the next was our State Capitol building. Around 10 a.m., I was helping my classmates order fast food in English. Several hours later, I was skating off the ice after beating one the burbs' cherished hockey teams. I'm still amazed by the spectrum of culture I encountered that day. Here we have the polar opposites of character: foreign teenagers from across the world leaving everything behind just to live in a safe society, and suburban hockey teenagers so comfortable with their carpeted basements, cul-de-sacs, and 4 car garages, it's disheartening—disheartening to watch what that does to one's personality, to one's ego.

And here I am, caught in the middle of it all. Meandering my way between the two extremes of our state. Watching as Minnesota simultaneously fosters refugees from around the world while promoting urban sprawl, a.k.a. "white flight". I can't help but think that the reason the suburbs are so overwhelmingly white (and consequently, so good at ice hockey) is because they've been historically fleeing from immigrants like those I went to high school with. Who knows, maybe that day wouldn't have been so memorable if we didn't beat Le Sueur that night. But we didn't win that hockey game for ourselves so much as we won it for city culture. We won that hockey game in the name of world acceptance, not in the name of 74-inch flat screen TV's or a place called "maple-something". Most of the kids I went to McDonald's with that day probably don't know much about ice hockey, but what they also don't know is that when I scored a goal later that night, I scored it for them.

Tonight, the holy grail of Minnesota high school sports will be awarded in my city, the City of Saint Paul. And it will be awarded to a suburban school. Either Wayzata or Eden Prairie. But no matter who wins, in a way, these schools end up the true losers of our state. They may know what it's like to be crowned champions in a real city, but they'll never know what it's like to live and love in that real city. They'll never know what it's like to bike from one set of skyscrapers to the next. They'll never know what it's like to go to school with classmates that are still learning to speak English. They'll never even know what it's like to live in a classic Minnesota town, like Winona or Duluth. As far as I'm concerned, twin cities suburban culture will never truly know anything except hockey.

So let them have hockey; but let them have their identical homes in their no-name neighborhoods. Let them have hockey; but let them have their morning rush hour crawl to work. Let them have hockey; but let them have their prejudices; let them run further and further away from my increasingly diverse city. Let them have hockey; but let them have their shopping malls, their gated communities, their expansive lawns, their sidewalk-less streets. Let them have hockey; because at the end of the day, hockey is all they've got.