Well they fit. But daaaaaaaaamn are they stiff. I have my work cut out for me breaking these puppies in. I can now see why Arturs Irbe allegedly had his bus driver drive over his new pads to break them in for the Olympics. Or why people might think you need to take a baseball bat to them. Relax, I'm not dumb enough to do anything like that. I do think, though, that I'll be bumbling around the house in them for most of the day tomorrow. Or scrunching them up and sitting on them like chairs while watching tv or surfing the web. One recommended method of breaking them in is to scrunch them up and tie a belt around them to keep them in position. Not gonna happen, not with the belts in this house.
But while I am relieved to know that they do in fact fit, I'm a little nervous about wearing them for the first time. The knee stacks are so much thicker that it changes the way I stand a little bit. And the added height at the top (the "+1" in the 32 + 1 sizing I guess) will allow me a much lower stance, and holy cow... now I know why they want to get rid of that height in the NHL. Super-sealed 5-hole! Sweet. (Well... probably thats the case on everyone but me). It's going to take some work getting used to that extra height; preliminary experiments on butterfly drops had me dropping with my knees too close together, and the tops of the pads overlapped. Not a horrible thing, but it results in double coverage, which means a hole is bigger somewhere else (in this case... at the foot).
Ah but I hear your brain waves lapsing into theta.... so I'll stop rambling about knee stacks and such. Simply put- they're going to take quite a bit of getting used to, and I'm nervous about that. But I can't wait to try them out in a practice. Yay Awesome Pads!
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Please, feel free to ramble on.
We should both break in our new pads by going out to lunch together and wearing them. Just because the looks we'll get will last us a lifetime.
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