I have discovered broomball

A friend called me from his Syracuse dorm… I have discovered broomball.

A friend called me from his Syracuse dorm last week. “Dude, look up broomball,” he said.

“What is it?” I asked. If it preempted football trash talk, it had to be something special.

“I can’t even … just look it up,” he said.

I did. It is amazing.

Picture hockey. Now replace the puck with an orange, kickball-looking thing and your stick with a “broom,” a plastic contraption that resembles an extra-long ice scraper. Oh yeah — take off your skates.

Do you like to slide on every patch of sidewalk ice you encounter? Broomball is for you. Do you laugh when someone wipes out on sidewalk ice? Watching broomball is for you.

You usually wear shoes with extra grip of course, but that just means everybody trots around with a perpetual Deion Sanders high-step. Like I said, it’s amazing.

When a player falls down on a rush, he spirals along the ice, cursing the lack of friction until he or she crashes into the boards or takes out someone else’s legs. Don’t worry. Helmets and pads make everything safe, but USA Broomball does note that the pads “make you slide forever” — like that’s a bad thing.

Yes, there is a USA Broomball.

Anyone can play. How often do you practice your ice-sprinting? Never? Great. Neither does anyone else.

It’s a sport that, at least recreationally, levels the playing field by putting everyone in an unfamiliar situation.

That’s probably why it’s popular on college campuses, where my Syracuse friend must have seen it. I haven’t even played it yet and I’m hooked.

Can you imagine playing defense? It’s one big game of being caught flat-footed. How about goaltending? You don’t get a glove, and with one false step you can careen out of the crease.

Whoever invented broomball must have been a creative genius, albeit a very bored one. When I was 9 and friends visited, it was only a matter of time until we were smacking pears through croquet wickets with Wiffle Ball bats. (Tip: If you hit the pear softly, it is less likely to explode.) Broomball must have been invented the same way.

Or maybe on a blustery winter day in Alberta, a pee-wee hockey team’s bus broke down on its way to the provincial championship.

Having just recently watched an inspirational movie, the team trekked through mountains of snow to the arena — only to realize they’d left their equipment on the bus. In a “never give up, never surrender” “Galaxy Quest” moment, they took to the ice in their boots and, armed only with brooms pilfered from the utility closet, emerged victorious.

Broomball Australia says the sport dates back to the Vikings and “was one of the roughest games invented … often deaths were reported from the games.” But that doesn’t sound like broomball to me. Did they even have brooms back then? Somebody ask a broom major. I’m sticking with my bored genius and inspirational-movie hypotheses.

I wish Central Oakland had an ice rink just so broomball could be at my frozen, numb fingertips. Yeah, an Oakland rink would mean Oakland hockey, too, but right now I have broomball fever. And it takes a strong fever to make me temporarily disregard hockey.

Manitoba is the world’s broomballopolis, but the province is 1,300 miles away from Pittsburgh, and I promised myself no more than an eight-hour drive to obtain my broomball experience.

Good thing the Mt. Lebanon Ice Center, which offers the sport, is 20 minutes away.

With five players and a goalie per side, the cost to rent the ice, brooms and ball will be a little over $10 per person. That sounds like a fair deal.

Several buses go within walking distance of the center, and nobody has to carry skates or a stick onto one. I just need to find 11 people who want to come with me.

So who wants to play some broomball?