Many frustrated National Hockey League fans were asking themselves that question before the NHL settled its recent labor woes and resumed play this weekend. That sentiment remains true, however, for a growing group of players of a lesser-known winter sport who are flocking to local ice rinks for the sheer, skate-free fun of it.

They are broomball players. And like Elinor Mason, a 27-year-old Beacon Hill resident who works for a biotech start-up, they get their kicks running up and down the ice — that’s right: running, and in sneakers, no less — while whacking a miniature soccer ball with what looks like an elongated windshield scraper.

The object? To shoot the ball past the opposing goalie, preferably without pinwheeling nose-first onto the ice or into the boards — which is hard to do in your Nikes.

If that sounds like a sport made for broom-wielding college kids standing on a frozen pond with an ample cache of Bud Lights, you’re on the right track. Invented in Canada a century ago and now played in numerous countries throughout the world, from Europe to Australia to Japan, the quirky coed game first landed in the Midwest sometime in the 1950s. It has since spread to college campuses and to leagues catering to 20-somethings in urban areas like Greater Boston, many of whom got hooked on the game as undergrads.

Part of the reason for the sport’s rising popularity is its simplicity. In broomball, traditional hockey skills like passing and shooting are useful to have. Staying upright, though, is job one. The race up-ice is not always to the swift; more often it goes to the surest-footed.

“When you’re in tennis shoes on ice, that’s an equalizing factor because nobody is good at that,” says Mason, a former collegiate ice hockey player who now plays for the Broomers, a 10-person squad competing in the Social Boston Sports (SBS) club’s winter broomball league.

Broomball may be one of the few sports, Mason adds, where players gather for a team-bonding brew before the game as well as after.

If nothing else, agrees Dan Rees, 29, a consultant from Allston who recently began his first season of recreational broomball, “It’s a good workout. And a good excuse to drink beer on a Monday night — before and after” the contest.

Locally, broomball is played as an intramural sport on a number of college campuses (Northeastern, Harvard, Boston University) and in late-night leagues like the one run by SBS, which meets weeknights at the Reilly Memorial Rink in Brighton. Games last from 10 to 11 p.m., when ice time is easier to get, and are played five-on-five, plus a goalie. Each contest consists of two 20-minute periods and a brief intermission.

The ice is not regroomed after all the skaters have left for the night. In fact, broomballers point out that roughed-up ice offers a lot more traction than a glass-smooth surface. As 28-year-old Kyle Davidson of Boston, a former St. Lawrence University broomballer, puts it, “It’s hockey for people who can’t skate.”

SBS favors the half-ice version of broomball, in which four teams compete cross-ice at the same time. Two sets of goals are placed across the rink’s width, rather than a lone goal at each end. Playing zones are marked off by plastic cones. Refereeing the games are SBS officials on skates, so they can maneuver around more easily.

Contact is incidental, if not infrequent, in social broomball. Dangerous play (high-sticking, tripping, slashing) may draw a whistle, resulting in a change of possession. But its more lasting sting may come from other players who don’t appreciate chippy play.

“You don’t want to be the guy sitting at the bar after a game that nobody wants to talk to,” says SBS cofounder Matt Rubin, whose sports club began offering broomball three years ago.

Rubin and his partners launched SBS six years ago. In addition to sponsoring skiing and white-water rafting trips, it offers organized, coed play in sports such as dodgeball, indoor soccer, volleyball, and inner-tube water polo (talk about quirky). Broomball made the list after SBS execs noted the sport’s popularity on college campuses.

“It’s easier to run a social league if they’ve already been doing it in college,” explains Rubin. Broomballers in the club’s target demographic (21-35) tend to come from the Northeast, where they don’t mind being chilled, he adds, and are drawn to wackier sports “where you might slip and land on your [rear end], and nobody laughs.”