Previous Entries: Part I, Part II
After sifting through more D5 videos than I care to recount, we’ve finally made it to the end of the countdown and man, this list has everything – OT winners, big comebacks, amazing saves, drinking games, brutal maulings…truly everything you expect from this league except the x-rated content not suitable for YouTube. After 5+ years, here it is…your Top 10 videos of all time.
10) Jack Scores Two For His Dad – Who knows if this was just random coincidence or a case of true inspiration but there was a once a game where Jack’s team was losing, I told him that his dad just jumped onto the livestream and he responded by immediately scoring two goals. Like no delay, absolutely immediately. One has to wonder if you had that power the whole time, why’d you wait this long to use it? But use it he did, putting up two in less than a minute in a beautiful tribute to his father who can pretty easily drink him and many of you under the table. It’s possibly the most wholesome thing that’s ever happened in this league and would’ve made me cry if I had feelings. As it is, I still found it quite enjoyable, heartwarming and worthy of a top ten selection.
9) Cheeky’s Brandi Chastain Moment – On a beautiful summer evening in 2019 Cheeky, perennially one of the top scorers in the league, decided to pay tribute to one of the all-time great moments in women’s sports. This may not have been a championship game shootout but it was truly electric nonetheless and was one of the league’s first viral clips. Men loved it. Women loved it. Approval rating: 100000%.
8) AJ Save Of The Century – I’m no goalie but the degree of difficulty on this save is crazy. The lateral movement is stunning and that the diving stop comes against one of the best shooters in the league is highly impressive. And to do it in overtime of a playoff game, and one of the longest overtimes we’ve ever had at that…I mean Meg’s expression in the thumbnail really does say it all.
The Hippos would go on to take this game on a crazy game winner where we were unfortunately robbed of an all-time Hicks celebration by an accidental stick to Jaimie’s face, but years from now this is what people will remember from this game. And by people I mean sickos like you.
7) Ariel Sends Hippos To The Final Four – This is quite a clip. First, at the 16 second mark you get perhaps the rarest treat of all: Hicks making an honest to god great defensive play as he dives to stop a chance by red.
Say what you will about his defensive acumen, he certainly pulled off way better than Jack (more on this one later)
Anywho, this sets up a sequence that leads to Ariel taking a pass from Sena and going all the way to the net, burying the game winner to send the 6th seeded Hippos into the final four for the second consecutive season.
As you might expect, it was immediately memed on Instagram for max rattling.
Of course, Cat got her revenge just a week later when she played for her actual team and won the championship and gave the rattle right back.
This had just been a sub appearance that no one would have even remembered if not for this fantastic post and borderline malicious tagging. For Hicks, this was en route to his 2nd consecutive finals loss. But eventually he would get over the hump in our next entry on the list…
6) Hippos Championship Winner – Hicks Is Him only making honorable mention surprised a lot of people but I felt like I should only include one clip from that championship run and this had to be it. One of the tensest championship games we’ve ever had comes down to the final minutes when Abby, whose selection in the 6th round (!) of that season’s draft is one of the great draft picks in league history, makes a great effort to get a shot on goal. Zisser, who had kept orange in it all game amidst multiple barrages by black, made the first save but Dewey buried the rebound through traffic. The crowd went wild and suddenly the Hippos were just a minute and a half from Hicks’ first D5 championship.
Somewhere in the stands, a young fan was super excited.
No one, however, was more excited by Hicks and with less than ten seconds left and his team on the cusp of victory, he appeared to go through puberty right before our very eyes.
Adding to the legend of this goal is that Hicks’ first D5 championship was delivered by Richard Dewey, his former nemesis himself. From the championship box scores:
At this point, I’d like to take a complete sidebar and introduce you to the Chronicles of Dewey, formerly the thorn in Hicks’ side and now inexorably linked to him forevermore. Dewey was on the Hippos in Summer/Fall 2021 but not even drafted by them: he was picked up by a different team that then somehow drafted more guys than was allowed and had to drop one of them right after the draft, then they dropped him even though they had drafted other people after him and one of the captains had played with him before. Then he ended up on the Hippos where he proceeded to ghost them and miss the first month+ of the season when they could’ve really used him. At this point, many of them were pissed at him. Then one day, he showed up in the scorer’s box and I didn’t recognize him at all because he now had long hippie hair. I introduced him to Hicks and the first thing he did was ask if Hicks brought a stick for him to use. Hicks immediately was even more pissed at this guy than he already was. And then, he actually played pretty well that game and said he was in for the following Friday. And then…Dewey showed up and absolutely balled out, much to the delight of the crowd and his teammates.
He had done it! After missing the first several weeks of the season he had against all odds won everyone over with his strong play that night. The Hippos suddenly looked like a threat. And then, like the Phantom of the Opera, he was gone. That was the final game he would show up for that entire season as the Hippos were eliminated by the Hooligans in the 4/5 game.
After all that, Hicks still drafted him again in the Spring and boy was he handsomely rewarded. A true redemption story if I’ve ever seen one and like the writeup says the two of them are inexorably linked in D5 lore for the rest of time.
5) SBJ Mauls Ariel, Sets Up Goal – Coming in at #5 is the quintessential McQuade clip: he speeds in from the wing with the gallop of a true thoroughbred, absolutely mauls a guy with a play that should really be a penalty, then while that guy is down he shows no regard for what he’s wrought and just sets up a goal instead. All Ariel can do is throw his hands up and wonder why he signed up to play in this ridiculous league in the first place. I know there are a lot of people who think this should be #1 on the list, partially because Jack often makes us watch this clip at tournaments, and probably just as many people wondering why this made the top 5 over the actual OT winner from this game. It’s a fair question. You really just had to be there during this legendary reign of terror.
4) Insane Stick Throw – This was probably the funniest thing I have ever seen at D5 and possibly in my entire life. In the middle of a hard fought game, this dude Matt on the Goonies made a brutal giveaway which led to an immediate goal. No big deal right? Well…let’s just say he did not take it well.
Cherie’s expression at the end really says it all as she goes from “hmm I wonder why he committed that awful giveaway” to “what the fuck just happened” in the span of literally one second.
At one point that season Sena and I discussed this incredible situation at length and she took this image and photoshopped incredulous Cherie into scenes from history: Pearl Harbor, the moon landing, the OJ Simpson verdict. My personal favorite was Cherie at the sacking of Kings Landing (spoilers for final season of Thrones but it’s been five years and that ending sucked anyways). Tragically, those photos have been lost to history. In any case, please don’t throw your equipment out of the rink as it is highly dangerous, but if you absolutely have to at least make sure someone’s going to deliver memeable content. On second thought, just don’t do it. It’ll never top this.
3) The Ami Cohen Highlight Reel – While Jo Robin may have been the rookie of the year for Summer 2023 in the metrics that hockey fans care about (goals, assists, dangles, general skill level), the rookie that stole our hearts was Ami Cohen, the breakout star of the Mighty Mensches. When they were officially announced via the press release that shocked the world, there was a fair bit of wondering how they would fit in with the culture of this league. What if they were crazy hardos who fought every game like they were a team of shorter Jewish Matt Rempes? Well, it took less than 10 seconds for me to spot this man with a cig in his mouth in the team huddle and just know that this was going to be just fine. And contrary to what everyone naturally believed at the time, that cig was not just for pregame purposes as he continued to steadily rip heaters on the bench for the entirety of the contest while doing as little running as possible in-game, no doubt at least partially because said heaters were wreaking havoc on his cardio. One of the finest D5 debuts we will ever see from the only player to have a D5 statline of more cigs finished during games than goals scored.
2) Goonies Two In 40 Seconds – This might be the only game in league history where a team scored an empty netter and then went on to lose the game. An absolutely wild turn of events where the Monsters, up a goal with less than a minute left, buried an empty netter and appeared to seal a surprise run to the finals as a six seed. But as anyone who’s seen the movie will surely tell you, Goonies never say die and in this semifinal game, they made one of the craziest comebacks you’ll ever see, capped off by Cherie putting the team on her back with a desperation shot as time expired that ranks among the craziest buzzer beaters I’ve ever seen in hockey.
Of course, this wouldn’t rank quite as high if the Goonies didn’t go on to win the game, but win the game they did.
To this day they remain the only franchise to win back-to-back cups and this semifinal victory remains the longest game of all time and easily one of the greatest games in league history.
1) Purple Stages A Comeback For The Ages – This one really needs some backstory to explain why a first round matchup between two severely flawed teams made it to #1 on this list. 2019 was a strange yet magical time. The Rangers may have sucked but no one knew what the hell covid was, White Claws were having an absolute breakout season if I’ve ever seen one and there was an apartment on the Upper East Side that was small on the inside and at times pretty much always gross, but also boasted an insane outdoor space which hosted some truly wild boozing events.
There was a league rookie party, there were weekly power hours, there was a random afternoon where I spent $100 on an inflatable pool only to watch Austin completely mangle the inflation of it (pictured above). One time one of them whose name I won’t mention (ok, it was Braun) shit his pants mid-party in the living room. Thankfully, I was not present for that. But it was a beautiful situation at that disgusting apartment and when the Summer season concluded, Jack asked me if I would be amenable to him and his two roommates leading their own franchise. This posed certain difficulties for sure. These were three of the top players in the league and it would require some finesse to make it happen. Two could be 1st/2nd picks but they would need to acquire an extra 1st rounder to make it work, and obviously I would need assurances that they wouldn’t scare off anyone on their team from ever joining this league again. But I was open to it because I like doing weird things and decided that even in the event they were overwhelmingly good with three elite talents up front, the entertainment value would be too much fun to pass up. Still, despite everyone who told me I was letting a team be formed with 3 first rounders, I was steadfast that I also didn’t expect them to be particularly great. They were using all their draft capital on three dudes who played forward and probably would have no idea how to manage a D5 team. So not only did I allow it, I even traded them my first round pick to facilitate this situation. All eyes were on the Purple People Eaters as the curiosity and buzz were overwhelming. Things did not get off to a great start as they tried to draft Yetter in the 7th round even though he was one of the top players in the league and had already been drafted in the 1st. Then the season kicked off. And man, it did not get any better for them as they took repeated ass-kickings en route to only winning two games all season. The nadir of their season may have been a week 8 pummeling at the hands of the Puffins as Meg and Luke made them look so horrifically bad that I had no choice but to put circus-like swing music over the video of their 9-2 shellacking.
The trash talk coming from orange after this game was insane and completely warranted. I mean seriously, what kind of defense was this? This remains one of my favorite shots from a D5 game ever because while Meg is a fast runner, how is there no one else even close to being in the frame from purple besides poor Dave?
But the hockey gods sometimes bless us with exactly what we need and, naturally, the two teams would meet in the first round. Pretty much no one gave purple a chance, even when Derek was a late scratch from the game. I mean they had just lost to the same team by 7 a couple weeks earlier. But even Derek was not particularly worried: he would come straight from his work event for the Puffins’ 2nd game, because of course there would be a 2nd game. Even without their 1st overall pick, orange was the heavy favorite. And when Derek texted me and I told him the score was 3-0, he was paying his check at the bar and getting ready to hop in an Uber. And then…history.
Somehow, in the snap of a finger, purple climbed out of the hole and turned into the team we all expected them to be all season. Facing swift elimination and the type of season-long humiliation that none of us would ever let them forget, they dominated the end of the game, pulled their goalie to tie it, then killed off a late penalty in regulation/early in OT only to win it as soon as Pags got out of the box and it became 4 on 4. It was honestly one of the most shocking things I’ve ever seen at any level of hockey, not just because of the deficit but because of how truly terrible they were for most of the season. If they were around +250 before the game, they were probably about +10000 down 3-0 late in the 2nd. But somehow they pulled it off to salvage what to that point had been an absolute nightmare season. And even though they would go on to lose in the next round to the eventual champion Hooligans when Jack got mutinied by his own team (a story for another day), this clip to me exemplifies why we play this crazy game: for the chance to make magic happen. It doesn’t matter how shitty your teams been, how bad the vibes are, how much literally everyone is making fun of your nightmare season. It can all turn around in one game, one moment. In the words of Vanilla Sky – every passing minute is another chance to turn it all around. And with that, I hope to see all of you next season as we embark on another opportunity to play hockey, get drunk and maybe make some magic happen of our own.