Having a (broom) ball

Mike Eruzione played his college hockey in this hallowed rink before he skated to Olympic glory at Lake Placid, netting the game-winner against the Soviets to set up a gold-medal game and a triumph for true amateurs. If there's a miracle on ice here tonight it will involve someone – anyone – not falling down and then laughing about it.

With 2:24 left in the second period, a player from the FUBs (no one seems eager to decode the acronym) swats a regulation orange ball backward from between his shoes. On the bench, his teammates – even a student coach who had looked Pat Riley-serious in his suit – erupt in laughter. Seconds later a helmeted player from Poison Ivy heads the ball, soccer-style. All seven spectators in the cavernous rink go wild.

The game is broomball, a shoes-and-sticks variation on ice hockey with the general tenor of a snowball fight – mostly convivial but with moments of cold-eyed competitiveness. The venue: Boston University's Walter Brown Arena and this week's coed intramural championships. "It has that hockey feel, but you don't have to be skilled to stand out," says Scott Nalette, the school's intramural manager. "You don't ever hear 'Wow, that's a very skilled broomball player.' "

You haven't heard of the top-seeded teams at this tournament – among them Super Tools, Team Chuck Norris, and Justice League. You probably haven't heard of this game unless you have a good-humored child at a hockey-playing school, outdoorsy friends in Minnesota, or a penchant for Canadian cultural exports.

But broomball, a helter-skelter spectacle of shuffling, shouting, and no-brakes stops, has come of age at this and more advanced levels. In 1999, eight teams – all from Minnesota – played in the adult-league national championships run by USA Broomball, the American sport's governing body, in Bloomfield, Minn. "This year we had 42 teams from nine states," says Kevin Denesen, the group's president, who estimates that 25,000 people now play in organized US leagues.

A national hall of fame is planned for Cambridge, Minn., next year to celebrate the careers of adult-league Great Ones including Mick Sletten and Tom Thaden. (At some levels, clearly, skill does become a factor.) Mr. Denesen is working with broomball's international federation toward winning heritage-sport status for broomball at the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver.

That would be a fitting world-stage debut. The game swept down into Minnesota from Canada like a cold-air mass in the 1930s. In the 1960s an adult-league boom took hold there. And in this decade, Denesen says, YouTube-type word of mouth has stirred national collegiate interest that has broomball proponents excited about the prospect of a feeder system.

Many schools across the northern US maintain old broomball traditions. At BU it was first played in 1975 – when a law school team and one from Shelton Hall paraded down Commonwealth Ave. behind the school marching band before their tilt.

It has since become the school's most popular intramural sport by far, topping 100 teams for the first time in 2004. Students come out in baggy sweats or cargo shorts and athletic shoes – often late at night, when the ice is free – to learn the intricacies of a game that looks like a hybrid of ice hockey, field hockey, and a run down a well-waxed bowling alley in socks.

Referees – it is at least formal enough to have referees – have been known to skate out and rough up the ice around the crease to improve playing conditions. Not that conditions are top-of-mind for some college players.

"When I was 7 you could have given me a tennis ball and a sweater, and in an hour I would have created a new sport and started a league. Broomball has that feel," says Lee Camp, a New York comedian and recent University of Virginia graduate who covered offbeat sports for his college newspaper and hears about broomball at his many campus gigs.

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