I considered murder. I considered abuse. I considered anything that would avenge the demolition of my teammate on the boards at the Wonderland of Ice. The Mamaroneck player, menacing behind the cold, metal bars of his face mask, glared at my captain with a grin as wide as a coastal horizon. A Popeyes biscuit away from 220 pounds, the criminal could graze the net of a basketball hoop towering over others at six and a half feet tall. A burly fellow, donning a white hat with a grinning, cheerful wizard, furiously shaking with his Santa Claus-esque belly, erupted from behind the glass, demanding that the official stop this madness at once. However, the hippopotamus could not convince the zebra, as the black and white linesman turned a blind eye to the apparent assault. Father always advised me to defend myself, especially to defend my honor. Knowing that it was of the utmost disrespect to leave my teammate wallowing in pain, I made a decision that boggles my mind to this day. Morphing into a wrecking ball, turning my shoulders, and absolutely annihilating the scary-seeming skater secreted endorphins into my bloodstream as my hefty frame plowed into his. My blow rattled him to the core, shaking and shifting every bone and nerve throughout his massive figure. As he slumped onto the ice, the New York crowd exploded in anger, demanding justice for their fallen player, while the hometown Bridgeport bench couldn’t resist cheering for my righteous hit. Suddenly, the high pitched screech of a whistle threw itself against the cold steel of the frigid rink. Twisting around rapidly to see if the previously blind referee had proclaimed that he could see, I could see the orange stripes of the linesman approaching quickly as if I were a deer that saw headlights in the dead of night. A groan and a cough escaped the lungs of the defeated athlete sprawled out on the cold, barren ice surface. Surprisingly, as I leered down at the carcass, an unthinkable and inconceivable happening displayed itself to the world: tears formed in the boy’s eyes, streaming down his face and soaking into his hand-me-down uniform. The anger and hatred in my mind that drove me to obliterate this once menacing man subsided and evolved into sympathy for a boy writhing in pain, a pain that caused him to shed tears and feel anguish. The striped man tugged at my shoulder and guided me to a small box carved into the puck-marked, high-density polyethylene. This cavern was where I would hand over the next two minutes of my life. The irony of the name “sin bin” drilled into my mind as I refused to believe that I had needed to abuse a teenage boy, marveling at my actions that verged on child abuse. Slumping on the tiny bench, I wallowed in my guilt as the red time-keeping numerals on the scoreboard dissolved into nothingness.