The Stanely Cup Playoffs start this weekend. I’m a longtime hockey fan and I really can’t think of anything more exciting to watch than playoff hockey. And with the Rangers actually being good this year, I’m usually a bit more engaged. So I decided to celebrate this upcoming awesomeness by playing a game of Nintendo Ice Hockey.

That’s right, I said Ice Hockey.

To anyone who grew up playing the NES, Blades of Steel is the superior hockey game, and I’ll agree with that. But Ice Hockey, which came out in 1988, was one of the first games I ever got after I received my Nintendo for my eleventh birthday, and I think that it was probably one of the games I played the most. So as much as I did enjoy Konami’s entry into the hockey game category, I think my heart has always been with the original Nintendo game.

When Nintendo came out, it was a true cut above the Atari 2600 and while it had a number of iconic adventure and arcade-style games, the sports games were very solid even if they weren’t as popular as, say The Legend of Zelda or Metroid. Ten Yard Fight would be completely forgotten in the wake of Tecmo Bowl, but was still a good football game; Baseball earned the nickname “glitchball” among me and my friends, but we still played it endlessly; Pro Wrestling remains one of the best wrestling games for the NES; and when I was in college, my roommates and I played endless hours of Golf. Ice Hockey was as good, if not better than all of those.

Like I said, I got Ice Hockey sometime after my eleventh birthday, and I think that I used some of my birthday money or Christmas money to pay for it because I distinctly remember going to the store with my father to buy it one morning and that we stopped at Pachysandra Nursery, which was on Lincoln Avenue in Sayville, just south of Sunrise Highway (I’m pretty sure they went out of business years ago). While he picked out whatever plants he was going to put in the backyard (probably pachysandra), I opened the box and pored over the instruction booklet. Normally, it’s something I probably wouldn’t have read, except that I was stuck in the car at a nursery and needed to occupy myself before I got to play the game at home.

When I did, it was easily one of the most “wow, this lived up to everything I hoped it would be” moments of my young life. The game was internationally themed, as you would play for and against different countries; the Calgary Winter Olympics had happened that year and I had spent a lot of time staying up to watch the hockey games, so it was right up my alley. And instead of a game like Baseball, where you picked your team and the only difference between them and your opponent was a different-colored jersey, this time around, you could actually build the four men you had on the ice.

As part of your team, you could choose from a skinny guy, an “average” (or “medium”) guy, and a fat guy. Each came with their pluses and minuses: the skinny guys were great face-off men and very fast, so I usually put them at center; medium guys were wingmen and all-around good; and the fat guys, while not very fast, were oustanding shooters and could also bump people off easily. With that in mind, I always had a skinny guy at center, two medium guys for wings, and a fat guy taking up the rear. I guess technically he was on defense, but I usually ended every face-off–which I often won–by passing him the puck and letting him lumber his way toward the opposing team’s net.

This always worked and resulted in my team–always Canada–running up a score of 20-30 goals on whomever was the poor team I chose to play (the options were the U.S.A., Sweden, Czechoslovakia, and the U.S.S.R.). Face-off after face-off was me passing it to the fat guy, whom I called Walter Hudson (after an infamous news story about a guy on Long Island who had to be cut out of his home … and in retrospect, I was an insensitive asshole when I was 11), would score. Sometimes, the computer would figure out what I was up to and get a ltitle more aggressive, but I could reestablish the pattern pretty easily.

So the other day, I went down to my basement and put in Ice Hockey. I’ve come a long way from the Sharp Linytron that my parents had bought to put in the basement and got to play on our older flatscreen Samsung (Nintendo looks great in HD, btw). I chose Canada as always and decided to take on Sweden. I was rusty at first, forgetting which button was passing and shooting for a moment and getting used to how the players moved around. I scored first, but by the time the second period started, I was only up by a goal. After a couple more goals in the second, I went into the Zamboni break with a comfortable 7-4 lead.

But this was disappointing. I spent years running up the score on Sweden, sending them home to cry in their IKEA beds, and I was not going to rest until I did some serious damage. And that’s when my usual tactic–which I’d tried all game with limited results–started to work. Goal after goal after goal became a 16-6 final score.

When it was over, I turned the game off and went upstairs to make dinner–adult responsibilities, after all–but it was nice to spend a little while recapturing the fun of being 11. Let’s hope that the playoffs are this fun and Let’s Go Rangers!