Dudes among dudes

I've grown fond of most of the guys I play hockey with, but two deserve special mention: JL and PH.

- On a Penn roller hockey team filled with future (and present) physicians and nanotube-obsessed engineering students, JL stands out nearly as much as I do. Recently he tried to bring up dialectics as part of the locker room conversation, and I was the only one who knew what he was talking about. He lives in a bizarre condo development in New Jersey.

- My ice hockey team is remarkably diverse, at least by the standards of the sport, which often seems to be the exclusive province of boorish, middle-class white men. Our squad boasts women, senior citizens, accountants, and honest-to-God POCs (myself not really included). But the most unlikely team member of all is PH, a Russian history professor at Penn, whose father translated Mikhail Bakhtin's major works into English. I sometimes wonder whether PH is a better player than the 'sphere's most famous hockey-playing academic, and given that he's scored three goals in the last two games, I'm inclined to say yes.