A poor reffing performance

Normally I'm not one to grumble at refs, as reffing is one of those "better them than me" jobs in my book, but last night...was a bit unfortunate.

Both teams' defensemen (yes, yours truly included, thank you) were having a tough night; it was 7-7 late in the third. They had a quicker team but our veterans' skillz showed through, and it was a reasonably even game. Then while standing next to our crease with an opponent (and a couple of other players), I turned to track the puck, and the opponent fell down. I'm not sure what caused it, but I got called for tripping. Shrugging philosophically, I went to the box.

There was less than a minute left in the game, so we went into overtime shorthanded. Overtime there is four on four, so the faceoff was four on three. Then, one of our bigger guys ended up bearhugging someone he was pursuing, incurring a tripping (go fig) penalty. He squeezed into the box with me, and then it was four on...uh...at this point, the refs disagreed. One said two, and the other (who was about to drop the puck) said three. The guy with the puck managed to get our team to put another player on the ice, and started the faceoff. Confused, the other ref was near our box, and I cheerfully updated him, "Can't have less than three." "Ah." he said. Glad I could help.

Now, if you're doing your math, you'll realize that we had two in the box, and four on three on the ice. I muttered to the guy in the box with me, "I think it's supposed to be five on three, but...guess we won't mention that one." He agreed.

Problem was, with this wonky setup, the next step in the progression of things didn't work -- that is, my time was up, I got out of the box on the fly, and we got whistled. Why? Because the numbers were even, but we still had one person in the box. *smacks forehead*

It was a running clock though, and while they were trying to explain the penalty, the ref looked up at the clock, and just said, "Never mind, game over." and called it.

I talked to the ref afterwards (this was the one that had realized that three was the correct minimum) and he basically said that had he not been given a hard time by the other team for -- something wonky they hadn't liked in that whole deal -- in an ideal world he would have explained to me/us that we'd have to wait for a whistle before coming on, because of the number of players on the ice.

At that point the zamboni drove us all off the ice and into the locker rooms to shake our heads. Nowhere in there had the ref thought that perhaps it should have been five on three in OT, making my on-the-fly entrance legal.

So...it was just one of those days.

I went to bed at about 2 or 3am last night after watching some TV and spending some time with the kittens. This morning I had meetings at 7am and 8am. I crawled back into bed at about 8:45am, having been short on sleep the previous couple of nights also. I woke up at about 3:15pm. I'm still achy...guess I was tired.