Chelsea hockey welcomed Lake Orion to town. It’s important to note that the Orion part of Lake Orion is pronounced OR-ee-un, and not o-RY-un like the constellation. Please adjust your mental pronunciation accordingly. If you’re reading this out loud to your loved ones, you may adjust your verbal pronunciation as well. Also, please tell your loved ones I say hi.

As you might expect, Lake Orion features a lake named Orion. Yes, that makes it the War of 1812 of town names. Come on, be nice. Anyway, LO also boasts a GM manufacturing plant and a mansion on whose grounds Amelia Earhart flew an experimental glider in 1929. Oh…and one more thing. Lake Orion has a dragon.

That’s the seriously wonderful Lake Orion High School Dragon logo on the shoulder of the hockey jersey. (Is that BLOOD dripping from its mouth? TELL ME IT’S BLOOD.) As a fan of meaningful and unusual high school mascots and logos, this one caught my eye right away. What I didn’t know until later is that there’s a story behind the mascot. From the town’s Wikipedia page:

The story of the Lake Orion Dragon says that sometime in the 1800s a group of local kids played a prank by building a fake dragon and launching it out in the lake. A number of people saw it and soon Lake Orion was known for its dragon. There are a number of stories around about who made it and how they built it but it is widely agreed that it was a prank.

Obviously the dragon is significant enough in the town’s lore to have become the high school’s mascot. That’s fantastic. Well done, Lake Orion.

Anyway: the Dragons showed up to play some hockey. Lake Orion has a solid hockey program, so the expectation was that it’d be a tough game. Indeed, that was the case.

It was clear from the beginning that Lake Orion is a very good team…but Chelsea isn’t exactly frozen liver, so the game stayed close. This made it hard on me: I like to alleviate the stress of a close game by talking to myself a little bit, but because I was sharing the Lake Orion penalty box with their backup goalie and standing right next to their bench, I had to keep my talking quiet and nonpartisan. That can be difficult — especially at moments like this:

I did keep quiet, though. I’m a professional. (When I need to be.)

Sometimes the goalpost is a goalie’s best friend. Sometimes…like this time:

Goalie shots like this can be a fun hockey version of Where’s Waldo in which you look for the puck:

Chelsea managed to find a couple goals in the third period:

Those goals propelled Chelsea to victory over Lake Orion.