In 1969, a lot of us who attended St. Louis Park High lived our hockey lives vicariously through Southwest and Edina High Schools.

We identified with Southwest because our schools and communities were a stone's throw from each other. We'd hang out together, say at Porky's on Lake Street or the Embers on Excelsior Boulevard. Sometimes some of us would surreptitiously drive to Southwest High to quickly kibbitz in their cafeteria, until we'd be recognized as non-students and told to "return to your school right this minute" by a lunchroom monitor.

And Edina? How could that be? St. Louis Park and Edina didn't get along so well, to say the least. Nevertheless, we were in awe of their hockey greatness. You loved to watch them play.

What choice did some of us Orioles have but to skip school and attend that year's state high school hockey tournament? Not only were the Southwest Indians (now the Lakers, thankfully) and Edina Hornets in the tourney, but so was "The Great One," our peer from a remote, tiny town, who we suburban and city kids mythologized as the best Minnesota hockey player ever — Warroad High's Henry Boucha ("Boo-shay").

Our fervent hope (worth the price of $2.50 tickets and infinite school detention) was to witness Boucha and the Warroad team show up Edina (and even Southwest, for that matter).

Why? One David against TWO Goliaths.

What a tournament! Thousands packed Bloomington's long-vanished Metropolitan Sports Center for each session. The exuberance and joy of youth reached a once-in-a-lifetime peak. Letter-jacketed kids from all over the state created a kaleidoscope of color in the arena. During the championship game between Warroad and Edina, a handful of us ended up finding seats in the Warroad student section, which turned out to be fine with them. We made a speck of our orange and black in their sea of their yellow and black. That night we were Warriors, too.

The air was, as they say, electric. Festive. Thrilling.

The day after the tournament, Minneapolis Tribune columnist Robert T. Smith called the tournament "a kind of healthy madness," where "thousands of high schoolers and parents completely obsessed … for three days." He observed: "A very pretty girl with brown eyes and tawny hair got so excited when her team made a goal that she grabbed the boy sitting in front of her and kissed the top of his head." Whereupon the boy "turned around, angry at first, but smiled when he got a good look at her. She blushed."

As for the atmosphere in the arena: "The sound is various forms of shrieking, which I define as noise at least 100 decibels above screaming. And the parents can be the loudest of them all."

On the downside, for some of us anyway, Warroad couldn't pull it off. Edina won. Again. And Boucha got hurt in the championship game.

This year's tournament, so many years later, again features Edina and Warroad. In place of Southwest there is a now team that comprises hockey kids from any Minneapolis public high school. It's called the "Minneapolis Boys Hockey Team." That's very cool. And they have no nickname. That's cool, too. So is the way the team's fans proclaim their roots with soulful chants of "612! 612! 612!"

One of the Minneapolis hockey players, junior defenseman Drew Pitts, well explained the spirit of this year's hockey tournament, and every year's hockey tournament. He said:

"In today's world, you need as many pockets of joy as you can get. This is something for people to look forward to and be happy about, a little distraction."

So true now, as in 1969.

A wise 17-year-old from "612."

Dick Schwartz lives in Minneapolis.