“Thank you for the clarification. So the buzz about Hawk is that he’s become sort of a team mascot.”
I laughed and scratched my beard as I tried to figure out her angle. If she had one. The Bear Facts was the student paper. Finally, I said fuck it.
“Hawk and the team get along very well. He’s usually on the ice with them during their morning skate while they warm up. They’ve devised a strange game of fetch with him during shooting practice. He even has his own set of pucks when they want to play with him.”
“Coach, Dan Jenkins from KMAN, with the team losing their first game of the season…”
“I’m gonna stop you there. The team might not have won, but the boys played hard. We’re still finding our footing. There’s a new captain, a new starting forward, a brand-new coach, and the starting goalie is damn good, but has been sitting on the bench waiting for his turn. We’ve had about a month together on the ice. The team we played today… their entire first and second lines returned the last two years, and their coaching staff has years more experience than ours. Those two lines have played together longer than any I’ve ever heard of. They play like they’re sharing a brain. That’s difficult to overcome, and today we didn’t.”
“Do you think having the dog on the ice is a good idea, Coach?”
“I don’t see…”
Will spoke up, “Coach Svartström’s service animal isn’t the issue. It’s the staff’s fault the boys weren’t more prepared. It will be something we, as a coaching staff, focus on.”
“Steve Olsen from The Daily Tribune. Can you be prepared for the Eagles? They’re division rivals…”
“Steve, I played here at The U. I’m fully aware the Maulers and Eagles are rivals. And yes, we will be ready. More than ready. .”
I pointed at someone else in the crowd and I recognized the fucker. I couldn’t remember his name but he covered my early days in the league and made it his fucking goal to make my life a living hell.
“King Masters. Hockey Monthly. It’s nice to have you back in the game, even if it’s only as a coach.”
That’s right. King was his name, and he took it literally. The man fucking irked me then and that question pushed me so close to the edge it crumbled under my feet.
“It’s good to be back. Coaching has been a dream of mine since I played here.”
“Then why turn down so many previous coaching offers?”
“None of them were The U. All those programs are top notch in their own right, but The U was the dream.”
I moved to call on someone else, but King asked, “Going back to the comment you made about the lack of experience on the team, do you think it was a good idea to start an unknown in the first line center?”
“I’m going to correct you. The individuals on this team are extremely experienced. I never said the team members lacked experience. That’s you taking my words out of context, which was something you liked to do when I was still playing. I didn’t like it then, and I can’t say I’m a fan of it now, so let me be blunt. This team is jam-packed with experience—decades and decades of it. What I said is that as a team, we’ve had just a few weeks to get to know each other on the ice, with several key players being new to their roleson this team. The other team did not have that, and I feel confident in saying that had thisgame happened a month from now, the outcome would be very different.”
Looking around the press room, I stood. This press conference was pointless. An utterly asinine waste of time. I had a team waiting, who needed hyped up so they could put this loss behind them. All sitting here did is let the press continue raking us over the coals until I took a page from my earlier days as a hot-headed hockey player known for storming out of press conferences after swiping everything on the table to the floor.
Yeah. That wasn’t happening.
TWENTY-FOUR
AIDEN
I sat in the living room of the dorm several days later playing video games mindlessly, the loss from this past weekend still playing on repeat. Everyone kept saying they didn’t know what went wrong, but I did. We didn’t trust each other. We didn’t communicate.
After the game the other day, I showered and changed, keeping my head down so the rest of the team would leave me alone. As soon as I dressed, I trudged through the tunnel to the dorm, hell bent on grabbing some more of my belongings and heading back to the club.
I came out of my room with some of my clothes bagged up and stopped short.
“Guys…”
Isaiah held his hands up and said, “We’re sorry. Blame alcohol and hormones…
“And a seriously dry spell…” Isaac took over from his brother. The words came out clipped and rushed.
Trey nodded, jerked his thumb at the other two. “What they said.” I thought that was all I’d get from him, not that I felt I really deserved anything else, but then he said, “I’m sorry, dude. It was insanely rude of us to be fucking in the living room. If the situation was reversed, I’d have been pissed the fuck off.”
I cleared my throat twice before I could formulate my thoughts.
