HEEKTOWAGA, N.Y. - After the game, Mike Sablesak, a fleet, 14-year-old winger for the Long Island Royals, sat on a bench in the stale, distinct hockey-stench of the locker room, bent over, his forehead pressed to his knees. He was crying.

This was during the state championship tournament here on the outskirts of Buffalo, and young Mike had had a shot barely deflected in the final minute of a game against the Syracuse Stars. From his reaction, you would think it was the end of the world, or at least the end of the Royals' chances. But in fact the game had ended in a tie, and for the Royals, whose home base is the Superior Ice Rink in Kings Park, the news was still good. They remained eligible for the title, and the mood in the locker room was upbeat - except for Mike Sablesak.

"I should've scored, I should've scored, I should've scored," he said bitterly into his knees.

His teammates consoled him; so did his coach, Jerry Higgins. But no one was surprised at the boy's intensity. As everybody involved in youth hockey knows, from players to parents to coaches to recruiters, hockey gets serious at the Bantam Major level, the designation for 14-year-olds in the arcane parlance of the sport. As one parent at the state tournament pointed out, her son's online screen name is Hockeyislife.

"Up until this age, love of the game can get you through," said David Smith, the manager of the Royals, whose son, Mike, is a defenseman on the team. "Now you have to commit yourself, on the ice and off."

Indeed, for the teenaged players what is at stake is the future, at least in the near term, as parents make decisions about schooling, vacations, and family budgets, placing bets on the basis of their sons' hockey prowess. Already at the Bantam Major level, players are generally on the ice year round. In addition to their travel teams, many Royals play for their schools, in summer leagues and on all-star teams that may be based in Buffalo or Boston or Toronto. One father, Candido Fuentes, a plastic surgeon, estimated that his son, Michael, will play 150 games this year.

"I didn't even care last year," Michael said. "This year it's intense."

Some Royals, as freshmen, are already on their high school varsity teams. Many have received recruiting letters from top Northeastern prep schools like Choate, Deerfield and Andover, where the hockey teams are, in turn, scouted by Ivy League universities and other Division I hockey powers.

The 14-year-olds are also looking ahead to playing junior hockey, which consists of the best amateur players under 21, and even in the pros.

"There's all these options," said Marty Messemer, another Royal. "It feels like there's so much more to achieve."

Spend any time at all at a rink where youngsters play hockey, and the symptoms of a new intensity are easy to spot. At 12, even at 13, the skaters seem like boys yearning to be men. At 14, especially in helmets and pads, they seem to have gotten there. The signature sounds of hockey, the scratching of skates on ice and the clack of puck on sticks, are at a noticeably angrier pitch. The checking can be brutal and injury-causing. The language on the bench is meaner, more urgent, more profane.

In the stands, the parents express their own intensity.

"You don't want to be the father of the kid who screws up," said Bruno Odoardi, whose son, Nick, is a Royals' defenseman. "And believe me, on this team they let you know."

Mr. Odoardi, who owns an auto repair shop, is one of many Royals parents who spend several nights a week in ice rinks and have invested tens of thousands of dollars in their sons' hockey careers. By this time they are hoping for, if not counting on, scholarship offers from good high schools and good colleges with good hockey teams. The idea that they are seeking a payoff for all their time, effort and money is a delicate subject for parents, but the issue is on their minds.

"No kid should ever have the added pressure that they have to earn some sort of reward for their parents," said Kevin O'Neill, a stockbroker whose son is a Royals' defenseman. "There is no payoff for me."

Hockey, said John Agosta, has been a way for his son Justin to learn discipline and to stay out of the kind of trouble that he himself was not able to avoid when he was a boy.

"My priority is to get him into prep school and then into college," said Mr. Agosta, who owns a car service. "So what are you going to do? If your kid is into it, you've got to be there. People say the parents are crazy, and they are a little. But they're here. You have to love your kid to do this."

Mr. Odoardi, who lives in Ardsley, N.Y., and makes the 120-mile round-trip from Westchester County to the Superior Rink twice a week or more, said his son's hockey costs him about $25,000 a year, not to mention 45,000 miles a year on his car.

"But thanks to hockey, I got custody of my son," Mr. Odoardi said. "My ex-wife didn't want to devote herself to it."

He said prep schools have been calling about his son, and he thinks Nick has a reasonable chance of playing in college. He knows that Nick's playing professionally is a long shot, but because Mr. Odoardi himself was born in Italy, by Italian law Nick qualifies for citizenship there as well. The knowledge that Italy is not exactly celebrated for its hockey players puts an Olympic twinkle in Mr. Odoardi's eye.

"In the land of the blind, the man with one eye is king," Mr. Odoardi said. "Now you see what my dream is?"

The state tournament was a chance to see all of these emotions ratcheted up and on display against the backdrop of a thrilling competition. Mr. Higgins, the coach, who has a gift for both strident Rockne-esque speechmaking and unexpected gentleness, cranked up his locker room elocution: "You block a shot with your chest, and if your ribs ain't broken, you suck it up and keep playing," he exhorted at one point.

The first hot-blooded casualty of the weekend came the night before the Syracuse game, when several Royals got into a food fight at a restaurant. One boy was tossed out of the restaurant by Mr. Higgins, who was then accosted by the boy's father, who accused Mr. Higgins of singling out his son and then, witnesses said, threateningly picked up a chair. Mr. Higgins sent the boy and his father home, but not before the father kicked in a hotel room door.

Then, early in the Syracuse game, Marty Messemer's collarbone was cracked with a rough check into the boards, and the Royals squad found itself seriously depleted.

Still, they played furious, inspired hockey, snatching a tie and then winning their next two games easily. Perhaps there were prep school scouts in the stands, perhaps not.

"They don't announce themselves," Michael Fuentes said. "We don't know who they are, but we know they're there."

But a handful of National Hockey League representatives showed up, including David T. Smith, who was the strength and conditioning coach of the New York Rangers when they won the Stanley Cup in 1994, and now works for the N.H.L. monitoring the fitness of the league's on-ice officials.

Mr. Smith (no relation to David Smith of the Royals) said he often scouted youth hockey players, mostly to satisfy his own curiosity. He went to the tournament as a favor to some parents of players on a team from nearby Wheatfield, to give them an opinion of their sons' talent.

"I'm basically looking for skills, skating," he said. "And a kind of attitude, a kid who wants a challenge, who wants the puck, who isn't so anxious to get it off his stick and onto somebody else's."

Mr. Smith acknowledged that youth hockey has gotten more competitive, and that one result is that talent evaluation begins earlier.

"We're starting to get more serious with the younger kids," he said. "Maybe that's not such a good thing, to take young kids and push them farther than we should." After a pause, he added, "I'm looking at this Long Island team and like what I see."

At 5 on Sunday afternoon, the Royals played in the state finals, their fifth game in three days and second of the day. The opponent was, once again, Syracuse, which jumped off to a 1-0 lead in the first five minutes. The Royals had only 12 skaters; the Stars had 18, and used their fresh legs to keep the puck consistently in the Royals' end. However, Joe Reagan, the Royals' goalie, fended off barrage after barrage, and with 3:14 left in the final period, Mike Sablesak scored to tie the game; this time, it was his father who burst into tears.

The game went into overtime. Then it went into double overtime. The winning goal, scored by the Royals' Damen Laviano, sent the parents into paroxysms of jubilation and relief, hugging one another and screaming themselves hoarse.

"This is the best championship I've ever had with any team," Mr. Higgins told the Royals in the locker room.

But the season isn't over. For Bantam Major hockey players and their parents, it never is. The national championship tournament begins on March 30, just outside of Chicago. More scouts. More pressure. Higher stakes.