from Kurt Leavins at The Cult of Hockey,

Sunday mornings in winter were the best at my house.

We were grain farmers. Without any livestock of our own to care for, Sunday’s were the one lazy day of the week that we almost always had. The day previous would have been spent at the rink, but unless we had a tournament that spanned the weekend, Sunday morning was quiet.

As the sun climbed hesitantly above the flat, frozen Saskatchewan horizon, the smell of breakfast would waft up the stairs. Mom was the cook in the house. But Sundays were all Dad and his famous pancakes. The best ones, ever. When it was time to get up, Dad’s footsteps would creak across the living room floor, to the foot of the stairs. There, he would stop, and whistle “I’ll call Rusty”, the theme from The Friendly Giant. The signal given, we kids would throw back the covers and race down the break-your-neck-steep stairs in our circa-1911 farmhouse, and claim our seats around the table.

The conversation would almost always centre around the game we all watched together on Hockey Night in Canada the night before. It was a pretty healthy exchange, as I recall, my sister participating, too. The six of us, without benefit of U-Tube or any other kind of replay, would break down the game by memory. We remembered who assisted on which goals. That Tiger Williams both fought Dave Schultz and rode his stick in the same game. That Bobby Clarke jabbed Brian Glennie a good one, in the you-know-what’s.

The radio would give some highlights from the other games. No Sports Desk of any kind existed. Eventually, one of us would go outside, knock the snow off the mail box, bring in the newspaper, and read out all of the box scores. My brother and I would debate who was the greatest player in the NHL. He contended it was Gilbert Perreault. I said it was Bobby Orr.

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