According to his website, Geoff Dresser is “a worship leader and Covenant award nominated recording artist based in Winnipeg Manitoba”. And, after hearing this, he’ll be “that guy who wrote the backyard rink song that gave you goosebumps”.

While Geoff is not a hockey player, he is a dad to a hockey-playing boy who had an idea several years ago: to build a rink in his backyard. And so, like any good dad, he went ahead and built one.

From GeoffDresser.com:

A couple of years ago I found myself outside on a very cold December night flooding an outdoor rink. I’m not much of a skater and I don’t play hockey, but I have a son who loves hockey and somehow he convinced me that this rink was good idea, so there we were. It was a perfect night – very cold and very still. There was a full moon shining so brightly we could see our shadows in the rink as we flooded it. The constellation “Orion” was shining down at us. Orion is supposed be a hunter holding his bow, but that night he looked like a hockey player hoisting the Stanley Cup. My son and I worked late into the night, along with our neighbours, on that rink. Eventually, we finished flooding and headed back inside, exhausted, cold, and soaking wet. As we removed our coats and boots he gave me a hug and said “Thanks, Dad.” He just did it. I didn’t ask him to thank me… it just came right from his heart.

There are moments in life that that you wish you could preserve forever, that you wish you could somehow bottle them and return to them whenever you want to. The best way I know how to do that is to write a song. So I wrote a song about that perfect night I spent out flooding that rink with my son. I hope you enjoy it.

Admittedly, this isn’t typically the type of music I listen to. But if you close your eyes and put yourself on that ice, under those constellations, and replace his child with yours…well, the type of music really doesn’t matter. Because Geoff Dresser nails it. The cold nights. The wet boots. The frozen fingers. The ‘thank you’s’.

The Rink Song.