"No one plays as many games, with less, as we do," said Flames goalie Rick Brown, 39, noting it costs about $1,400 a season to be a Flame, not including another $1,400 or so in travel expenses for overnight road games.
It doesn't matter. There are few monetary Flameouts.
What price does a man put on the thrill of making the playoffs at the age of 50?
Or pulling up to an orphanage just before Christmas on a fire engine loaded with toys?
Or visiting a child in the hospital who doesn't know a Flame from a Flyer, only that he shook hands with a hockey player?
"It's priceless," said Brown, an 11-year Fire Department veteran. "Why do we do it? Why do we run into burning buildings? We do it to help people.
"We're more than a hockey team, more than public servants. We're community servants as well."
But once they're on ice, the Flames are a team to be reckoned with.
"They're very good, very professional," said Dave Waldman, a 47-year-old dentist, hockey player and local administrator of Hockey North America, an adult amateur league.
"They play top-quality hockey," he said. "They're not a bunch of guys who put on gear and make fools of themselves."
The Flames started as an ice- and roller-hockey pick-up team in the summer of 1996, playing mostly for exercise and a night out.
After a year, the team chucked the rollerblades. It was then that Brown, who was a goalie at Lincoln High School, got the idea of organizing an ice-hockey league composed of fellow public servants.
After phone calls to at least 30 local police and fire departments, the Public Safety Hockey League was formed.
The league - Brown describes it as "more of a brotherhood" - includes firefighters, paramedics, police officers and state troopers from New York to South Jersey.
Last year, the league's second, the number of teams doubled from six to 12. Brown expects the league to top 30 or more teams in the next few years.
