Desperate For Hockey

James Hughes contrasts NHL players and fans desperate for hockey with the members of the Shackleton expedition, desperate to live:

After Christmas, a bored Canadiens defenseman took to Twitter to suggest a pickup game at a public rink in Montreal, the hockey-crazed city where the NHL was founded in 1917, and people of all ages arrived in droves to skate alongside a pro. Like all bright spots during hockey's shipwrecked season, however, there was a bitter chaser. The following week the New York Times reported that cooling systems are now required to keep ice inside Arctic arenas frozen, posing concerns that the Canadian tradition of pond hockey might fade by midcentury.
Cooling systems were hardly necessary at Antarctic pick-up games. In Sara Wheeler's biography of Apsley Cherry-Garrard, the English zoologist and third editor of the South Polar Times, she recounts a hockey game in 1911 that "was abandoned when the puck, which they had made from shellac and paraffin wax, shattered as soon as it was struck." Other pieces of equipment were built to last. Among the items preserved by sub-freezing conditions inside a prefabricated hut erected during Robert Falcon Scott's deadly Terra Nova expedition over a century ago, one can still find tins of digestive biscuits, a chemistry set frozen in mid-use, a box of penguin eggs, and hockey sticks. (On a related note, a stick belonging to the Australian cartographer Alexander Lorimer Kennedy, used during the Australasian Antarctic Expedition of 1911-14, sold at a Christie's auction in 2007 for more than $3,000.)
No account of the Heroic Age of Antarctic exploration is complete without reflecting on Shackleton's ill-fated voyage on the Endurance. In 1915 the ship froze into the ice "like an almond in the middle of a chocolate bar," according to the ship's storekeeper, resulting in an unimaginable quest to reach civilization that stretched over 400 days. The icebergs that surrounded the ship resembled "the creations of some brilliant architect when suffering from delirium," the captain wrote in his diary. The men's faces were filthy from blubber smoke and the icicles on their noses couldn't be cracked off without tearing skin. In the early days of their isolation, the men kept their spirits up by hosting dog derbies and stockpiling seal meat. "Hockey and football on the floe were our chief recreations," Shackleton wrote in his diary, "and all hands joined in many a strenuous game. " He later noted that hockey games "on the rough snow-covered floe kept all hands in good fettle." The welcome distraction didn't last long. The crew lived in perpetual fear of the "Crack of Doom" that would split their ship for good and send it sinking into "the drink." In July 1915, Shackleton met with his captain and second in command to plan a full retreat from the relative comfort of the ship's cabin and exist out in the open. "The ship can't live in this, Skipper," Shackleton said. "What the ice gets, the ice keeps."

The hockey lockout wasn't quite that bleak, that's for sure.  However, a winter in Canada without hockey would have to have led at a minimum to a massive drinking binge.  Especially after the juniors did so poorly at the World Championships.