Back in 1985, when I was a young boy growing up in NewHampshire, my friends and I were obsessed with the sport of bandy. We couldn’t
stop thinking about it and talking about it. We desperately wanted to start our
own bandy team and travel around northern New England, competing against other
bandy teams. But there was a
problem. There weren’t any stores in the
area that sold bandy equipment. None of
the sporting goods stores had even heard of it.
So we had to settle for hockey.
My friends and I played a lot of hockey, but we always fantasized that
instead of chasing the puck around with hockey sticks, we were swatting a
little orange ball around the ice with one of those curved bandy things.
We followed the sport of bandy fanatically. And any true fan of the sport knows that one
of the world’s leagues is the “Damallsvenskan” league in Sweden. We knew the teams, we knew the players, and
we formed fantasy teams for our Allsvenskan fantasy league. Of course there was no internet in those
days, so we all pitched in for a subscription to “Allsvenskan Åskådare”
which was delivered to my friend Mike’s door. And every month, when the
newsletter arrived, we’d gather around in the penalty box at our local ice rink
and pore over the latest stats and player trades. Problem was, it took a few
months for the newsletters to arrive from Sweden, so we always got our Damallsvenskan bandy news long after the ice had melted. To this day, I’ve been a rabid fan of the
Allsvenskan league. It’s the second-highest league in the nation (you might not
have known that) and the biggest stars of the Allsvenskan league are eligible
to play in the Elitserian league, the top league in Sweden!
So you can imagine how impressed I was during my
daily perusal of Swedish newspapers when I saw that our very own former Seawolf,
Hanna Slotte, scored two goals in two matches for Uppsala BoIS! The only thing more impressive is the fact
that Hanna found the sport through a Google search.
You can read all about Hanna's icy exploits by clicking on the picture of Hanna below:
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