A thin slice of ice.

Malcolm Gladwell had a pretty famous book a bit ago called Blink, which was essentially about how making snap decisions (called Thin-Slicing) without actually thinking can often be the best course of action, assuming you're opperating in your own area of expertise. The example from the begining of the book is one where an art museum buys a statue which initially is thought to be real but later proven to be fake. The second group of experts who examined the statue needed but one look, a single glance to know that something wasn't right. They couldn't explain why they knew it was fake, they just did.

So the other morning I was watching bits of the Blue Jackets - Oilers game from a few nights/mornings ago. At one point in the second, Horcoff et al. were coming in on a three on three. Horc carried it up to the blueline and dished it off.... right then, I knew something was wrong, even before the whistle went. I was only half watching Horcoff, paying more attention to the Oiler at the top of the screen (Smyth I think), but as soon as Horcoff crossed the blueline, some sort of ... I dunno, alert... went through my head. After the whistle went to indicate the offside, I didn't really think anything of it for a few seconds. Then I realized I wasn't actually sure where the offside had been. Had it been Smyth at the top of the screen? Was it Hemsky? Did Horc carry the puck over the line and then pass it back across? Where was the infraction exactly? I rewound and watched the scene again.... too fast, too many players and moves to track. Even then, I could still tell something was wrong. I slowed it down at watched it at third time, and this time I finally understood that it was none of the above, Horcoff had dished it off to Hemsky about six inches before he crossed the line, putting himself offside. The puck was sitting on the blueline, inches from the Columbus zone while Horcoff's skate was no more than an inch over the line. By the time my brain caught up to what was happening on the ice and I heard the whistle, Horcoff was already across the line with his teammates, and everything looked normal.

I'm sure anyone who's watched a fair bit of hockey has experienced the same thing and knows what I mean. There are other instances, a quick turnover in the offensive zone and suddenly the opposing defenseman has the puck and he's just pounded it up the ice. But the puck's barely ten feet from his stick and you just know that he's not clearing it, somehow a forward has snuck behind your D, and though he's certainly not visible on the screen and the broadcasters haven't had time to even raise the excitement in their voices, you know he's about he's about to receive a breakaway pass. You haven't been tracking the opposition numbers in their zone, if the game were paused just as the defenseman grabs the puck, you wouldn't know that there are only four bad guys visible and the fifth is somewhere dangerous unless you actually thought about it and looked for it. But years and years of watching hockey (from the TV camera perspective) has told you that something's wrong here, and you get a bad feeling even though you don't quite know why yet.

After thinking about it, I was reminded of the book I just mentioned, and I realized that refs must have that ability on a much more detailed scale. That's how they see the subtle little infractions that happen a mile from the action, they don't know it, but something in their brain goes hey, high stick! even before the offended player has the chance to double over and grab his face to check for blood/missing teeth.

Now, if it wasn't so late and I actually had the book with me, I'd get into what Peter Gzowkski talked about in The Game of Our Lives with regards to elite athletes ability to "chunk" their environment into particular scenarios and instantly discern order from what would look like chaos to anyone else. It's sorta related to this topic, making instant decisions without actually knowing what you're seeing.
Actually, a brief google of the words "gretzky chunking gzowski" gives us an article by Gladwell himself which uses the example of Gretzky from that very book, so perhaps I'll just post a bit where Malcolm gives an excellent example chunking :

"A chess master, for example, can look at a game in progress for a few seconds and then perfectly reconstruct that same position on a blank chessboard. That's not because chess masters have great memories (they don't have the same knack when faced with a random arrangement of pieces) but because hours and hours of chess playing have enabled them to do what psychologists call 'chunking.' "

and the quote from The Game of Our Lives (which gives a much better description of chunking, including the chess example) :

"What Gretzky perceives on a hockey rink is, in a curious way, more simple than what a less accomplished player perceives. He sees not so much a set of moving players as a number of situations. . . . Moving in on the Montreal blueline, as he was able to recall while he watched a videotape of himself, he was aware of the position of all the other players on the ice. The pattern they formed was, to him, one fact, and he reacted to that fact. When he sends a pass to what to the rest of us appears an empty space on the ice, and when a teammate magically appears in that space to collect the puck, he has in reality simply summoned up from his bank account of knowledge the fact that in a particular situation, someone is likely to be in a particular spot, and if he is not there now he will be there presently."

In that five-hundreth of a second where Horcoff was over the blueline but the puck wasn't yet, my brain at least knew something was wrong, even if it had no idea what was wrong yet, and then on replay couldn't even tell exactly where the infraction was.