As a teenager, while playing hockey in the late 80's and into the early 90's, playing the puck became a much more important part of the goaltender position and I quickly discovered that flipping the stick over and shooting on my "forehand" (like how Curtis Joseph played the puck for example) allowed me to pass the puck with much better accuracy and zip on the puck (because I was on my "forehand.") However, it also meant I couldn't have a curve on my stick (cause the curve would be backwards on my stick when I was playing goal and would only be curved properly when I flipped the stick around (so the blocker was low on the shaft and the catcher was up top.) So I abandoned this and began training myself to shoot the puck the way you commonly see goaltenders do this today. This meant training myself to shoot left rather than right and it also meant figuring out the best way to hold the stick with the catcher hand down low on the shaft and it was a frustrating ordeal for awhile because it was very much a "take a step backwards to take two stops forward" situation. To better aid in this process, I began shooting left in ball hockey (I played wing in ball hockey) and this rapidly improved my shot and I would take countless shots against my garage in the summer shooting left until I became very adept at it. The following summer I had a job at a hockey camp (who essentially just needed a goalie for drills) and each day I would get about five hours of ice time and I endlessly worked on my shot until I was firing up up the glass with a ton of velocity and making very crisp passes from the goal line. Once I got those things down, I began to work on dumping the puck the length of the ice, which was a very lengthy process to develop this skill. I would do it over and over and over again on the with buckets of pucks and slowly but surely I figured out how to get good loft on the puck (so I could clear it over incoming opponents) and then how much weight was required to get it down the length of the ice.
This led into my senior year of high school and my puck handling was a huge part of my success that season as teams really couldn't dump the puck in on us as I would go out, retrieve the puck and quickly move it to teammate and put us back on the attack. It also meant when we were on the powerplay I would move about ten or fifteen feet out of my crease so I could quickly track down any clearing attempts by our opponents and quickly fire the puck right back up to my forwards in the natural zone. Toward the end of that year, winning a game 3-0, I corralled a dump in with the opponents goaltender pulled and lofted a shot way up high that landed well over center ice and began sliding down toward the gaping net but eventually started to drift and ultimately missed the target by a few feet.
I wouldn't get another opportunity to "go for one" for eight more years.
Eight years later I was in the exact same situation, up 3-0 and our opponents pulled the goalie (with a significant amount of time left in the game, well over four minutes on the clock) and I went behind my net to get a dump in and almost went for a shot but realized there were too many people still in the neutral zone so I hesitated and ended up passing it off to a defensemen who chipped it up and it was knocked down at the line and they put a lazy shot on net that I gloved and this time I went for it, dropped the puck at my feet and fired one up in the air and I knew this thing was in before it even landed on the ice. It was dead straight and it came down around center ice and if it weren't for the fact that they had been on for a pretty long shift, I think it would have been tracked down, but this team was gassed and couldn't get to it and slid all the way down the ice and into the net for my first - and last - goal.
About a minute later they scored a crappy goal through my five hole on a snap shot robbing me of a goal and a shutout in the same game.
