BillR writes, “Don’t know what “shinny” is”:

Having grown up in southern Ontario, I knew it was a game sorta like hockey, so this is just a cheap pun. Wikipedia adds more detail, of course: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinny

…which is interesting, because I played a lot of street hockey and never once heard it called “shinny”. Nor was raising the ball (never a puck!) forbidden, nor were teams chosen by throwing sticks into a pile. May be a regional thing. Body checking was indeed not part of the game, though of course it happened occasionally.

We’d get out there of a winter’s Saturday morning–the churchyard behind my parents’ house was ideal, except for all those cars on Sundays–and play until it got dark around 4, skipping lunch. Nothing quite like taking a frozen tennis ball to the ear after you’ve been outside in subzero temperatures for several hours: first you feel nothing, then it starts to itch, then burn.

Good times!