Here, A Nick While Shaving Could Determine The Stanley Cup

I CLIMBED into the drivers seat of the Zamboni about 15 minutes after the end of the third period. The electronic screens suspended from the ceiling of Madison Square Garden still showed the final score of the seasons first National Hockey League exhibition game: New York Rangers 4, New Jersey Devils 3. But by now, almost all of the Gardens 18,000 seats were empty, and the public address system speakers were blaring the last few bars of Billy Joels hit song New York State of Mind.

I felt a thrilling, teeth-clenching chill. The Zamboni was parked just inside a gate at the Eighth Avenue end of the rink. A vacant expanse of skate-scarred ice sprawled before me like a wrinkled cotton sheet awaiting an ironing. In a dubious effort to calm my quivering body, I mouthed the words Charlie Brown immortalized in a Peanuts cartoon, There are three things in life that people like to stare at: a flowing stream, a crackling fire, and a Zamboni clearing the ice.

Jack Durkin, 46, climbed into the backward-facing passenger seat, staring at me with anxiously flickering blue eyes. Tall, lean, and mustached, Jack has been driving Zambonis in the Garden for 19 years; his peers call him the sensei of ice resurfacing. Id persuaded his bosses to give me a shot at driving a Zamboni on the basis of my recent attendance at a prestigious race car driving school and a binder supplied by my insurance company.

Everybody wants to drive a Zamboni, Jack muttered. Theyve never let anyone do this before. But thats O.K. Youre going to be fine.

I stepped on the Zambonis accelerator pedal. The machine lurched forward with its 4-cylinder Volkswagen engine growling like a pack of sled dogs. This was, quite literally, crunch time. I had to perform a checklist of equipment activation and steering procedures in exactly the right sequence. Otherwise, my fanciful executive pursuit was going to turn into a humiliating, potentially quite expensive disaster that even the resilient Charlie Brown couldnt survive.

I sucked an asthmatic breath, focusing on the daunting task at hand. As I had learned over the preceding two days, operating a Zamboni is actually more complicated than driving a race car, and for a novice like me, almost as dangerous. The machine has a top speed of only 9 miles an hour. But its 12.5 feet long, nearly 7 feet tall, and it weighs over 7,000 pounds with its 180-gallon water tank fully loaded. An out-of-control Zamboni could cause serious damage to an arena like Madison Square Garden in a few crashing skids.

A properly piloted Zamboni, however, can do more good than any other single piece of grooming equipment in major league sports. It simultaneously performs a triad of functions that provide the equivalent of a virgin skating area. The Zamboni scrapes off and washes away so-called dirty ice. It funnels the refuse ice into a dump tank under its hood. And it lays down a consistently smooth surface of so-called green ice.

The genius behind this marvel of scientific engineering was Frank J. Zamboni, an inventor and skating rink proprietor in Paramount, Calif. In 1948, he created the first ice resurfacing machine mounted atop a Jeep chassis. Priced at $5,000, the original Zamboni transformed what had been a backbreaking 90-minute task for three people with shovels and water hoses into a job one person could complete in less than 15 minutes. The company has since sold over 8,000 Zambonis worldwide.

Apart from the inventor, few people did more to transform the Zamboni into a pop cultural icon than the cartoonist Charles M. Schultz. A Minnesota native and hockey fan, Schultz made over 50 references to Zambonis in his comic strips and films. Schultz provided a miniature Zamboni for the tiny bird Woodstock to use when his birdbath iced over. But he awarded the honor of driving most of his imaginary Zambonis to Snoopy, the ice skating beagle.

As the world famous hockey coach, what do you do when the other team attacks? asked Charlie Brown.

Circle the Zambonis! Snoopy replied.

Jack Durkin prepared me for my chance to emulate Snoopy with over four hours of practice sessions at the New York Rangers training rink in Tarrytown, N.Y. I quickly discovered that piloting a Zamboni is a true art. Turning is relatively easy thanks to a knob mounted on the steering wheel that enables you to maneuver the machine one-handed. But in contrast to a car, which has a blind spot on the back left side, the Zamboni has a blind spot on the front right side of its dump tank. Jack warned that if I stood up to peer over the tank, my foot might slip off the accelerator pedal.

Youve just got to get a feel for where the machine is, he said.

Jack also taught me that it is crucial to keep the Zamboni in constant motion on the ice. If a car starts going too fast or veers out of control, you can simply step on the brakes and stop. But if a Zamboni stops for more than a few seconds, its sheer size and the heat generated by its engine may melt a deep hole in the ice that can only be repaired by intensive hand labor.

E-mail: pursuits@nytimes.com

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