Late Great Bauer 300

I came upstairs last night to see a broken Bauer 300 leaning up against the wall. It was a stick I had bought years ago for one of my boys. School had been canceled, so instead of staying indoors out of the sub zero wind chill and heavy squalls, my youngest was out shooting on a half -buried hockey net sticking out of the snow. It must have snapped in the cold I thought. The Bauer had been regulated to street hockey duty. I loved that stick. I had bought it years earlier at a tournament in Buffalo for my middle son. I was coaching my oldest boy’s Bantam team, while my middle son was playing in the Peewee division. I was shuttling between rinks to catch one of the Peewee games.
When I walked into the rink my son met me walking up the ramp from the locker room.
His team was about to go on the ice, but he informed me that his composite stick was broken. Being a lefty, there wasn’t a spare available the right size from anyone else on the team. I knew I had enough time to run up to pro shop and buy one quickly. Dashing through the crowded arena I made it to the shop and franticly looked around for a stick that would work. I saw a red left-handed stick up against the wall. Luckily it was just the right length, so I bought it and rushed down to the locker room just in time to watch the team head out to the rink. I taped it up during warm ups while my son tried using a smaller stick a teammate had let him borrow. I called him over to the bench, leaned over from the stands and handed him the stick. “What’s this?” he asked. “ It’s a Bauer 300, Lindros 88, it matches your jersey number. You’re going to score a lot of goals with this baby” “ Thanks” and he skated away. He never said anything about it being made of wood. He did score a lot of goals with that stick. It got a lot of ice time, but soon he outgrew it, and it was passed down to his younger brother. We bought another one a few years later to replace the original that was eventually retired to the shed. We’ve got a lot of old hockey sticks in the shed. I held it my hands shaking my head and thought that there’s no way I’ll ever find another stick like this. My wife later informed me that she had found lots of them on the Internet. “What? You mean anyone can get one of these?” There’s something not right about that.