In This Hockey League, Furious Fun is the Goal

"The women are the best ones on our team," BFL MacQuarrie acknowledged.

So good, in fact, are the women on the Phantoms and Roadkill that one team or the other wins the championship every year. So Raue had to create a loser's playoff for the other six coed teams. It's called the Sheba Cup, after the dog. (As in "Come Back, Little . . . ") "That damn Sheba Cup. It's just an old champagne bucket my wife found at a yard sale," Raue said. "You'd think it was the damn World Series."

The winners take it from bar to bar and drink out of it. The winners of the Phantom-Roadkill face-off get T-shirts.

The Phantoms are tight on and off the rink. They go out for beers at Cap City Brewery in nearby Shirlington after every game. They celebrate birthdays together. They go to movies together, such as the hockey classic "Miracle," all except for No. 91, Nelson Eng, 41. "He had to go with someone else," Benito scolded.

And the ribbing is nonstop. The Phantoms call Eng "Tight Lips" because they think he works for the CIA. "I'm an economist at State," he pleaded but later asked a reporter, "Please be discreet."

As the group got ready to head out for beers, Dave "Rocket Man" Radzanowski, 41, a NASA engineer, moaned that he had gone to the eye doctor that day and had to get bifocals.

"Hey, maybe that'll improve your defense," was the only sympathy he got.

Marriages have been made and broken up at the rink. Deals have been done. And scores have been settled. Sometimes the action in the parking lot, where everyone hangs out, is at least as interesting as the action on the rink.

Most everyone competes in fun. And if anyone goes too far -- as one all-lawyer team did once -- they're out. "They were a damn bunch of fascists," Raue said. There are Germans and Russians, Canadians and a Pakistani. There are homesick transplants from the Northeast who grew up playing ice hockey on ponds and in college and who found that the dearth of ice hockey rinks in the D.C. area made playing here too expensive and too inconvenient, with some games starting at odd hours, such as midnight.

And like any self-contained universe, Alexandria roller hockey has its own celebrities. Such as Billy Bush of "Entertainment Tonight" fame. "He was intense," said one player respectfully. And Tony Rudy, a one-time aide to Republican former representative Rep. Tom DeLay. Rudy pleaded guilty earlier this year in the federal corruption and bribery case associated with disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Rudy's roller hockey team was called the Vandals.

"Yeah, the Abramoff scandal literally cost us an entire team," Raue lamented.

And, as in any universe, there are the characters. Such as Truman, the referee, who came out of nowhere, Raue said, and one day will probably disappear again. And then there's Raue himself.