The locker room was chaos—music blaring, cameras crowding. Luke stood near his stall, towel around his neck, still breathing hard, eyes bright and unfocused like he hadn’t quite landed yet. Their gazes found each other across the room for a fraction of a second.
Not now.
Cassie turned away before the pull could become visible.
She waited for Tanner Brooks to finish with his television interview, recorder steady in her hand despite the tremor in her chest. When he finally reached his locker, he was sweat-soaked and grinning like a man who knew exactly what this moment meant. She slipped seamlessly into her role.
“Tanner,” she said, voice even, professional. “You’ve been chasing this your whole career. What went through your head when that puck came to you?”
As he answered—talking about trust, about timing, about staying ready—Cassie nodded in all the right places, asked thefollow-up she’d already written in her head. She filed away quotes, framed the arc, did exactly what she was there to do.
Still, every so often, her eyes drifted—just briefly—back toward Luke’s stall.
He was laughing now, arm slung around Elias Johansson, the adrenaline still humming through him. He hadn’t looked her way again, and she was grateful for it. There would be time later.
When she finally stepped back into the hallway, recorder off, heart still racing, Cassie leaned against the cool concrete wall and closed her eyes for a moment.
They were going to the Preston Cup Final.
Forty-Three
The Preston Cup Final arrived with too many storylines to hold at once.
The Renegades would face the Chicago Blades—Luke’s former team, the organization that had drafted him, developed him, and ultimately decided he was expendable. The narratives wrote themselves before the puck ever dropped: Luke against his old teammates, Chicago’s relentless, high-flying offense versus Pittsburgh’s balanced, grinding approach, two franchises clawing toward the end of droughts that had stretched long enough to feel generational.
Cassie prepared the only way she knew how—by disappearing into the work.
She watched hours of Chicago tape, filling notebooks with shorthand only she could decipher. She wrote about matchups and tendencies, about how Chicago liked to activate both defensemen on the rush and how vulnerable that left them if Pittsburgh could force turnovers at the red line. She noted faceoff percentages, goaltending splits, the way Chicago’s top line liked to overload the left side on the power play.
And beneath all of it, unspoken but constant, was the awareness that this might be the end. Not of the season—of something else. She tried not to think about how close she might be to stepping away from the beat she’d built her life around, how these mightbe her last stories written from the press box of Allegheny Arena. She focused on what she could control.
Game 1 in Pittsburgh felt hostile from the opening faceoff.
The Blades blitzed the Renegades early and forced Pittsburgh into mistakes they hadn’t made all postseason. Two goals in the first ten minutes put the Renegades on their heels. Luke was on the ice for both—caught between assignments once, a half-step late closing a gap the second time. Chicago never let the game settle, rolling four lines and keeping the pressure constant.
The final was ugly: a 5–2 loss that felt wider than the score.
Cassie wrote about adjustments—about the need to tighten gaps, to slow the neutral zone, to get pucks behind Chicago’s aggressive defense. She didn’t linger on individual blame, but she didn’t soften the truth either.
Luke texted her later that night. “We’ll get them back.”
She stared at the message for a long moment before replying. “One game at a time.”
Game 2 was the response Pittsburgh needed.
From the start, the Renegades played heavier, more deliberate. Damien Morris scored twice by going to the dirty areas Chicago preferred to ignore. Connor Martin was brilliant in net, swallowing rebounds and flashing leather when the Blades thought they had daylight. Luke played with a snarl Cassie hadn’t seen from him all season—clearing the crease, finishing checks, making Chicago’s forwards pay for every inch of ice.
Pittsburgh won 4–1, tying the series.
The narrative shifted, and the series shifted back to Chicago for Games 3 and 4
Game 3 was a thriller.
The teams traded goals all night, neither willing to blink. Every hit landed heavier. Every whistle felt like a small mercy. Late in the third, with the score tied 3–3, Luke pinched down the boards on a broken play, retrieved a loose puck below the hashmarks, and threw it toward the net more on instinct than design.
The puck trickled through the goalie’s pads.
She barely remembered typing, fingers moving on autopilot as she captured the moment before it could slip away:Luke Anders, once jettisoned by Chicago, now stood at the blue line with both arms raised, the weight of a franchise on his stick and a city behind him.
