Skating on a Thursday night, rolling back the years

This is why they have come from all over New England, queued up outside a squat building hard by the Merrimack River in Haverhill’s Bradford section, with a thousand dollars worth of leather, aircraft-grade aluminum, and urethane in their bags. This is their night; the last great one left, they say. Thursday night at Skateland in Bradford is where the roller skaters skate.

At 7:30, the doors open and they stream in. Quick glance at the floor - the owner, Marc Pyche, just spent a week sanding and refinishing the $90,000 worth of Canadian hard-rock maple that is his chief draw - and the skates go on. Slowly at first, couple of laps around, getting a feel for the grip in the new floor, and then it’s flashback time. The lights go down, the music goes up, and the swagger creeps in.

They are middle-age, mostly, holdovers from the nights before Rollerblades, when quad skates were king and the wheels rolled to the thump of the ’70s, the beat you can move your hips to, the real Travolta stuff. By day they are hair stylists and construction workers, lumberjacks, and retired engineers. But tonight, they skate, really skate, the way you can when you remove the mayhem of squealing children (it’s 18-plus) and the rules they necessitate (it’s the only night in Bradford when skating backward and skating fast are allowed).

Terry Young gets it going. He’s 49, has driven an hour and a half from Mansfield, and now he’s in the middle of the floor, dancing on wheels, doing his thing.

“I feel better than I ever have in my entire life,’’ he said of his return to skating a year and a half ago, when he discovered the adult night in Bradford. He’s lost 55 pounds, and his wife says he’s been rejuvenated.

“You say ‘skate,’ and he’s ready,’’ Rhonda Young said, keeping her distance from her husband, who is practically shooting sweat. “He rushes home from work and gets right in the car. He’s like a kid.’’

Around the borders, the shuffle skaters are getting started. One foot on the floor, one foot doing a little dance move, hips and shoulders swaying with a 10-deep conga line.

Annie Mahoney’s here, like she is every Thursday. She’s small, has a blond bob, and is old enough to not want to give her age. Drives 30 miles from Lynn.

“The floor and the music are what matter, and he gets them both right,’’ she said of Pyche, who is pumping Mary J. Blige’s “The One’’ from the speakers. She’s been coming for years and bonded with the other skaters; there’s 300 of them on a good night. This is her exercise, and this is her escape.

“I’ve been a hairdresser for years, but when I go to the doctor, they say I have the heart of an athlete,’’ she said. “Skating got me through a divorce. It got me through losing people.

“There’s something about it that releases all that. I don’t think about any of it when I’m skating.’’

As the night goes on, the younger generation filters in. Roller derby girls fly through the crowd in formation. In the middle, the jam skaters - who fuse breakdancing and bebopping into the traditional roller disco - stretch and get ready.

Keith Webb goes up into a one-armed handstand, falls back, and uses the momentum from landing on wheels to go straight into a tight back spin. Webb, who was raised right up the street, has been coming to Skateland since he was 5. Now that he’s 22 and working 12-hour days in construction, he’s finding something different in these sessions.

“It’s such a stereotypical answer, but it’s a way to express myself,’’ he said.

Up in the DJ booth, Pyche puts on the Black Eyed Peas. “That tonight’s gonna be a good, good night,’’ they sing. The crowd moves in agreement.

Pyche knows what they’re feeling. He’s 44 and grew up in the skating world. His parents owned a half-dozen rinks, including the legendary Bal-a-Roue in Medford. But that’s gone now. Most of the good ones are. The state has lost 10 roller rinks in 15 years, Pyche said, and more are going because the real estate is worth more than the rinks.

Pyche said he never wanted to go into the family business, drifted for a bit, but came back 15 years ago, bought the Bradford rink out of bankruptcy, and tried to re-create the old days, when the floor mattered, when the skating mattered.

He launched the adult night eight years ago, and he personally handles the music because the music matters, too. The regulars appreciate it; on a typical night, the youths want rap, but they say it’s hard to skate to. Pyche labels the Thursday night music as rhythmic, but that’s just a general cue. He plays some current stuff, but mostly he reaches back, across the decades, with a single goal in mind, that final touch to complete the effect.

At some point in that night, he wants everyone to have that moment. A song ends and a new one starts, a song they remember, a song that triggers a feeling: This, they’ll think, is a song I skated to when I was younger.