January 1-3

According to the Chinese Zodiac the new calendar year is the Year Of The Rat, I prefer to make a bad pun and call it the Year Of Perfect Vision (20-20). January started quietly on Wednesday with the traditional college football games on TV, on Thursday Jenny and I had our midweek lunch a day later than usual. After supper I went over to McCaskey, the boys had the late practice time starting at 5:30. I gave the scorebooks to Freddy since I was going to be away for the weekend, the club had back-to-back home dates coinciding with Royals games at the Arena. On Friday the Worcester Railers came to town for their first appearance of the season and the opener of a two-game set. The Royals began the night eighteen points ahead of Worcester in the standings but you would have never known it, on this night the visitors from central Massachusetts scored twice in the first four minutes and held that lead through two periods. Another marker in the third put the Royals back by three and effectively ended the game, midway through the period Trevor Gooch got the Royals on the board but a Worcester empty-netter in the final seconds put the cap on a 4-1 decision. Felix Sandstrom started in goal and suffered the loss, the Royals drop to 18-11-4 and 12-3-1 at the Arena. There was one bit of good news for the evening, when I got home I saw on the 'net that JPM had won over Manheim Township 79-60, along the way Elijah Terry scored his 1000th career point. Elijah played his first three years at Lancaster Mennonite and scored 804 points before coming to JPM, there are those who might want to put an asterisk next to his name because of that but 1000 is 1000 no matter where it happened. He becomes the twelfth player in school history to reach the magic mark and the fourth to achieve this between another school and JPM: Dustin Salisbury (2003) started at Lampeter-Strasburg, Devonne Pinkard (2013) and Randolph Speller (2016) both began at Lancaster Catholic. The boys host Oxford (from Chester County) in a non-league game on Saturday while I'm back with the Royals for game #2 with Worcester. Take care, thanks for reading.