Who Are Those Guys?

One of my favorite movie lines comes from Butch Cassady and the Sundance Kid. At the end of the movie, they become the hunted outlaws and they have become so formidable and so elusive that the only way to capture them is to send out a super posse en force. From a distance, Butch and Sundance see them coming and they wonder out loud “who are those guys?” As in much of comedy by repetition, the gambit becomes funnier each time they acknowledge it.

Here we are in the final tournament of the 2021 Covid-infested season, drawing a number 2 seed to a number 1 seed, Gloucester Catholic.  I admit not knowing a great deal about the hockey history of the southern part of New Jersey. I did find out this season, or more accurately, realize, that Gloucester Catholic’s main rival, their Don Bosco or Evil Empire, is St. Augustine. Here comes the yawn. I know, St. Augustine is not a hockey household name up here near the living breathing locus of hockey, Morris County.

Isn’t Delbarton the epicenter of all things high school ice hockey? True, it was Brick for a while and during the 1980s many state championships went through Montvale. But the Hermits versus the Rams⸺that’s a rivalry? I suspect it is probably in other sports and that spills into ice hockey for these two schools. But please excuse my yawn.

Tomorrow, if both Don Bosco and Bergen Catholic announced in 2022, they would field tiddlywinks teams, the game of the year/season would be Bergen-Bosco. Pre-season rankings in The Record would be listing the two schools as 1-2. And, as the current Reeses commercial says “not sorry.”

Who are those guys?

We won’t know until Match 4, whether we need to know any of this but, just in case anyone is looking ahead, we do have a recent (we only played them in this century) 18-game history with the Gloucester Catholic Rams. And, while we may be 3-3 in our last six encounters, we are in the skank, 7-10-1 all time. Only one game came in the Gordon Cup and, dear Lord, we lost that 6-0 in 2013. We played them twice in the state playoffs and won both times 5-4 in 2009 and 3-2 in 2017.

The fact that they escaped with a win in our home opener this year and their constant ranking ahead of us all season kept gnawing on my brain, so I finally satisfied my curiosity, did the heavy lifting, and charted our mutual game history. We might not even meet them in the finals but now we’ll have a better idea of who “those guys are.”