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By Jack Knox, Victoria Times Colonist

It wasn't until I stepped onto the asphalt Saturday that I tried to remember how long it had been since I had a hockey stick in my hands.

Last competitive team I played for, one of our defencemen smoked on the bench. (Guess we weren't that competitive.) It was a long time ago.

No matter. It's got to be like riding a bike, right?

Which, come to think of it, is how I broke my leg a couple of years ago.

Saturday was the last day of the Play On! national street hockey championship tournament, out in front of the legislature on Belleville Street, which was blocked off for the occasion. I was there for a just-for-fun game, but the real teams -- 30 of them from across Canada -- were scrapping for the $10,000 winner-takes-all prize as though it were the Stanley Cup.

CBC Television was on scene, cutting in and out of Saturday's Hockey Day in Canada coverage. Two Australian TV crews were there, too, shooting the tournament for their pre-Olympic coverage. The Aussies must have twigged on the obvious: Hockey is the only event Canadians really care about.

In the Turin Olympics, Canada finished third out of 81 countries in the medal standings, but ended up seventh in men's hockey. In other words, the 2006 Games were a total disaster. Sure, it would be nice to show well in curling, or Ski-Doo racing, or ice fishing, or whatever, but only one medal really counts.

Peter Gzowski called hockey the "game of our lives." He was almost right. Ice hockey is what we watch, but road hockey is the game we actually play. The national game of Canadian mythology and Tim Hortons commercials is played on a frozen pond or a 6 a.m. rink, but in reality most of us spent more time, winter or summer, denting garage doors/cars/slow children with tennis balls than slapping pucks off Plexiglas.

Every once in awhile some soul-sucking Scrooge will make news by trying to chase the kids off the street. Tiger Williams famously rode to the rescue in 2000 when some Port Coquitlam condo owners went to court to force neighbourhood children off the road. "Ball hockey, roller hockey, ice hockey, it's the fabric of this country, it's what holds it together from one end to the other and we can't let whoever get in the way of that," Tiger was quoted as saying while offering to pay the kids' legal bills. A couple of years ago, Sidney Crosby stepped in when Halifax city council tried to ban the game, too. Ottawa actually did pass a bylaw, further proof that if Canada ever gets an enema, the tubes should go down our nation's capital.

Yet here in The City That Fun Forgot, the game blossomed yesterday. The Vancouver Wildcats won the women's Play On! title. Victoria's CCCP made it all the way to the semi-finals on the men's side before losing to Calgary Phantoms, who themselves were beaten 3-2 on a late goal by the Vancouver Ball Hoggz.

"We play for the love of the game," said the Ball Hoggz' Sharny Kaila, a 34-year-old labour relations officer from Surrey. "Since I was old enough to hold a stick, I've been playing in the streets."

His is a serious team, playing in the Western Ball Hockey League in the summer. They travel to tournaments in the Maritimes, Toronto, all over Canada. Like other teams at the two-day tournament, their game was fast, skilled, passionate.

Me, my game was just for kicks: some media gorks, biz guys, HMCS Victoria crew. Mayor Dean Fortin was on my team (though he didn't make good on his threat to show up with tin foil taped to his knuckles like the Hanson brothers of Slap Shot fame). So were ex-pros Tom Martin and Geoff Courtnall.

Geoff's brother Bruce was on the other side, along with former NHLers John Newberry and Brad Palmer, plus Hockey Night in Canada's Scott Russell.

It was fun, though jeez that hockey ball still stings like rejection when it meets exposed flesh. And the other side scored while I was sitting on our goalie, The Q's Shayne Kay, just like Frank Mahovlich sat on Tretiak in 1972, except Tretiak and the Big M weren't, um, on the same team. Geoff Courtnall just laughed when, after he wristed a rocket into the Inner Harbour, I said "See, you can put the puck in the ocean." (He scored 367 goals in the NHL.)

It felt like being 12 years old, playing the game of our lives.

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