The puck will not stop here

The good-natured jibes are usually cutting, most often age-related, and nearly always met with laughter, from the source and recipient.

"You see why he never passes the puck?" said Bill Bailey, 80, of Wellesley, pointing toward Dick Lyons, 74, in the locker room as Lyons took out his hearing aids before the game. "He can't hear us calling for it."

Lyons, a Needham resident, shrugged, laughed, and continued to dress for the game at the ironically named Quincy Youth Arena, this day the home of the Quincy Bald Eagles, a group of about 60 senior men playing a young person's game with the enthusiasm they've had since playing it as youngsters.

They may be skating in the winter of their lives, but as spring heats up toward summer and hockey's season is ever-endless, these guys don't plan on slowing down any time soon.

"Ten years ago, I said to myself that if I was still skating at 80, there was something wrong with me," mused Dan Hall of Duxbury. "Well, I'm 79, about to be 80, and I'm still here."

"At least you can remember saying it," said John Cusick of Marshfield, who at 66 is one of the relatively young ones in the group.

The group was formed about 15 years ago by Bill "Bibby" Lewis, now 80 and skating less than he used to, but with significant hockey chops, having played for the Army and Boston College.

The Bald Eagles, the name so coined due to the receding hairlines of most of the players, was initially for those 60 and older, meant for guys whose hockey salad days were behind them but who still loved a good skate.

Most of them are still around, older and a bit slower but no less pumped about a game they've loved since the days of no helmets and pond hockey, many of them having cut their skating teeth as children at places like Spy Pond in Arlington.

"Big pond - there had to be 100 games at a time going on there," said William Egan, 80, of Marshfield, who played collegiate hockey at Tufts University, about Spy Pond.

Though there are other seniors skating in rinks around the area, the Quincy Bald Eagles are the most organized and faithful group, comprising entirely old-timers, said Bill Parsley, 74, a goaltender who can still stack the pads to slide into a flying puck.

"Originally, we skated just one day a week, but as time went on, it grew to three," he said, with some guys skating even more than that, if time and family obligations allow. "Attendance is down in summer, but we still normally have 14 skaters plus two goalies."

The Bald Eagles each pay an annual membership fee of $10 and are charged $6 per skate, with the rink getting $5 and the group getting $1 toward its annual functions, such as the Christmas brunch.

On the ice, their reflexes aren't what they used to be, but the hockey smarts remain and show in accurate passes and well-timed shots.

Some of these men were players back in the day, most notably Jack Garrity, now 83 and living in Florida most of the year, having finally hung up the blades.

One of the group's original members, Garrity, who was on the 1948 US Winter Olympics hockey team, is in the Boston University Hall of Fame, and still holds the single-season BU scoring record of 51 goals.

As the weather warms, several old-timers who live elsewhere in winter come back to the area for summer and return to Quincy to skate.

One notable player is Warren Lewis, a former BC great who lives in Oregon. He was a 1949 member of the Boston College National Championship team that went 21-1 that year and an all-American who played some professional hockey after graduation.

"He's 80 now and still plays a good game," Parsley said.

In the group are players from all sorts of careers, most of them retired, including college professors, Catholic priests, prosecutors, cops, firefighters, and even the occasional reporter.

And, as if skating three times a week here isn't enough, this group regularly puts together squads to travel as far as California to play the game they can't stop playing, including in the much-beloved Snoopy's Senior World Hockey Tournament started by Charles Schulz, creator of the Peanuts comic strip. (Schulz and, by cartoon proxy, Snoopy were huge hockey fans.)

In all, the group has fielded teams for some 70 tournaments over the years, and each year they enter a squad in the Massachusetts Senior Games, in the 70-and-up age bracket.

They will be the first to say their skills have eroded, but are equally quick to point out that in many cases the skills have been passed down to their children, usually sons, but occasionally daughters.

Karen Cashman, daughter of 77-year-old Fred Cashman, won a bronze medal in short-track speed skating at the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway, a veritable chip off the old ice block.

Some of the guys have played together since childhood, including Hall and Bailey. They played at Colby and one day this spring headed up to that Maine college to see their former hockey coach, who is now 93.

Meanwhile, on the ice at the Quincy Youth Arena, "Hold it!" is the cry heard most often, yelled when a player hits the ice anything more than gently.

Play stops, the man's condition is checked to make sure he's OK, which he usually is, and play continues, as they skate a game that keeps them in terrific shape and is a large part of their everyday life - even occasionally saving one.

Parsley said a couple years ago, a player accidentally speared himself in the side when he landed on his stick. He took himself out of the game and, finding blood in his urine, immediately went to the hospital.

There, doctors found one bruised kidney - and cancer in the other. The tumor was removed, and the man is still skating today. Had it not been for hockey, his friends muse, the cancer might not have been detected so early.

And while the level of competition isn't what it used to be, the jousting is not always restricted to the ice.

Cusick, whose uncle is Fred Cusick, the legendary and now retired Boston Bruins announcer, told of two players in the locker room one day arguing about the severity of their recent heart attacks.

"One guy says, 'Yeah, I got a stent in my heart,' " Cusick said, laughing. "So the other guy says, 'So what? I got two!' "