Intramural Hockey

Anytime there is a physical competition between two teams composed of young males, tempers are bound to flare. The University of Pittsburgh intramural roller hockey league is no exception. I’ve played for the past 3 years and it seems like not a game goes by where at least one or two fights break out among the players.(And by fights I mean medium-to-hard shoving and guys hurling out incomprehensible insults to each other that somehow seem to make sense as long as fuck or some variation of fuck is used gratuitously). The humorous thing is that when a fight escalates to the point where it is borderline out-of-control, this is usually the point where somebody steps up and says the only 3 words that will immediately stop the fight. “Dude, it’s intramural!” Those 3 words carry a lot of weight and are packed with meaning. Allow me to explain...

When you say, “Dude, it’s intramural” to two people who are about to rip each others heads off, you’re actually implying this… “Guys listen, it’s 12:20 on a Tuesday night. We’re playing in the shittiest, most uncompetitive hockey league that is composed of the worst assortment of hockey talent that the University of Pittsburgh has to offer. Our teams don’t even have jerseys and there are exactly 4 people sitting in the stands, 3 of whom are girlfriends of players. It’s really not worth it to fight with anybody else over something as insignificant as intramural hockey. Please, think about what you’re doing.”

And during my 3 years, I can honestly I have never encountered a situation where "Dude it’s intramural” didn’t immediately defuse the situation….

As an aside, the “Dude” seems sort of pointless and unnecessary but for some reason that I cannot entirely understand, I have never heard somebody omit the ‘dude’ nor has it ever been replaced by a similar word like ‘man’ or ‘bro.’ Nobody can really explain it, but the expression is simply rendered ineffective without the presence of ‘dude.’



*Written May 2007 by Jesse Wells