If you’re going for cute, it’s hard to beat a couple of dozen preschoolers on ice skates. Add in hockey helmets that nearly double the size of their heads, elbow pads and knee pads and a smattering of hockey sticks, and the parents assembled around the glass let out a collective “Aawww” nearly every week. This is learn-to-skate for hockey, with an emphasis on the “learn.” By three weeks into the class, about half the kids are using metal frames to keep themselves up as they push their way from one side of the rink to the other. It is, coincidentally, about the same proportion as those wearing Patrick Kane jerseys. The kids in the pack line up on one side of the ice, follow the coach’s instructions to sit or fall down, get up, bend their knees, hop up and down and skate to the other side, where they repeat the process. Teresa, this time, is one of the kids not leaning on a frame. She’s been promoted to a hockey stick, a cut-down hand-me-down from Frank, with handle and blade wrapped lovingly in pink tape. Never mind that there are no pucks. The thing is, the first time she took this class, a year and a half ago or so, she never stopped using the frame. Or the second time, or the third time. It wasn’t that she couldn’t propel herself around the ice without it; she just couldn’t quite figure out how to get her feet under her and stand up when she fell down without something to hang on to. After she tried a couple of times, she would give up and wait for someone to come and pick her up. So we figured that maybe she just wasn’t ready, or maybe, as much as she wanted to be like her brother, hockey wasn’t her thing, so we stopped taking her to classes until she asked to try again. This time, she used a metal frame for the first class, much to the dismay of Frank. The next weekend, he took her skating and had her popping up onto her feet within about 15 minutes. Then he circled the rink with her four or five times, all the while reminding her to keep her knees bent and her body leaning forward. She hasn’t used a metal frame since, although when she gets tired on the ice, she casts longing looks in their direction. When she falls, on purpose or not, she pushes herself to one knee and then up, the way Frank taught her. If it doesn’t work the first time, she tries again. Diligence, sometimes called persistence, is one of the virtues, as is patience, and a Japanese proverb says that to succeed, when you fall seven times, you must get up eight times. I don’t know if Teresa will want to go on to play hockey, but I do know that learning to skate has already helped her learn far more valuable lessons.