All I Really Need to Know I Learned Playing Hockey

In what is probably the best movie ever made about professional athletics, exuberantly enthusiastic hockey goon Steve Hanson inquires of the near criminally sociopathic hockey goon Ogie Ogilthorpe, “Hi Ogie. Buy you a soda after the game?”. If you’ve never seen the 1977 classic Slap Shot, go rent it today (in the event you have to talk anyone into it, it does star Paul Newman, so there’s that). Players and non-players alike laugh at this scene but I fear for different reasons. It is set up as the classic absurdist moment within the context of the drama- why ever would two utter goons make nice after the game? For the player, however, there is an additional dimension. Hockey players do make nice after the game, even after trying to beat the living crap out of one another.
Here begineth the lesson.