Been there, done that. Nothing worse than not being able to get off the ice after a long, relentless shift. I felt for the kid, but not so much that I wasn’t going to take full advantage of his and his teammates’ exhaustion.
Fortunately for them, it was only fifteen seconds between the puck dropping and the whistle blowing, this time allowing them a desperately needed line change.
Unfortunately for them, that whistle was because I’d put another puck behind their netminder.
3-2. Fuck yeah.
Coach kept us out, too, since we’d only played a handful of seconds. On the way back from fist-bumping our teammates on the bench, Taylor smacked my shoulder. “Seven minutes left in the period. Think you have a natural hatty in you?”
I wasn’t sure what gave me a bigger surge of energy—the prospect of notching a natural hat trick, or the way Taylor’s eyes danced as he suggested it.
Either way, I was suddenly determined to do exactly that. My focus had been digging us out of the hole we were in on the scoreboard, but now I wanted that hatty so bad I could taste it.
“Let’s do it,” I said, and his smile got even brighter.
Hell yeah. I was doing this.
I did, too. With just fourteen seconds left in the second period, after a dagger of a stretch pass from Taylor, I one-timed the puck under the netminder’s pad.
I hadn’t had a natural hat trick since major juniors. Hatties, yes, but especially in the NAPH, it was hard as fuck to get all three goals in the same period. So what if this was the PHL? A natural hatty was a natural hatty, and I celebrated like it had just won us the cup. So did my teammates… especially my gorgeous linemate, who was grinning from ear to ear, unaware of what that was doing to my balance.
But the real celly came in the third period. I assisted on the game-winning goal, and the absolute elation on Taylor’s face when he realized his shot had gone in? When the goal light came on and we had the lead after being down 3-0? That huge, gleaming smile?
I wouldn’t be forgetting that any time soon.
CHAPTER 7
TAYLOR
We had precious little time to celebrate tonight’s victory. There was the usual postgame speech from Coach while we stripped off our gear, and there was some cheering and backslapping. That was it, though, because the bus was already waiting outside. We had to shower, shovel some food into our faces, and get our asses on the bus to head to Paine Field, where our plane was waiting.
As we walked out to the bus, though, I noticed a hitch in Vasily’s gait.
I jogged up beside him. “Hey. You okay?”
With a taut smile, he nodded. “Just… getting back into it. After…” He gestured at his knee.
I frowned. “How bad is it?”
He waved a hand, and I wondered if he knew how noticeable it was that he wastryingnot to limp now. “Just aches. It’ll be fine.”
I winced but didn’t push the issue. Injuries could be like that sometimes. Even when they were healed enough for someone to play again, they could still hurt and be annoying. And Vasily had played hard tonight. After Coach had changed up the lines, we’d played a lot more minutes than we’d thought we would—closerto what I usually played every night, but maybe more than what Vasily and his knee had expected.
Not that he’d held back. As we settled on the bus with our teammates, I couldn’t help grinning just thinking about that hat trick of his. Sometimes when a player came down from the NAPH and mopped the floor with the PHL guys, people just rolled their eyes and dismissed him as a ringer. And sometimes that was true—there was a reason he was in the NAPH while we were in the PHL.
But wewerestill pros, and San Francisco had several players who all the analysts expected to see in the NAPH before too much longer. Their goalie had a long and storied career ahead of him for sure—he was just young and still developing. If he wasn’t called up for good next season, I’d have been shocked.
In fact, tonight had probably been good for him. Demoralizing, sure, but he’d faced a sniper of a goal scorer. Vasily had multiple hundred-point seasons under his belt, and he’d been Vegas’s number one in goalsandassists his third season. Facing someone like him had to be great for a goalie’s development. It was a taste of what awaited him when he broke through to the NAPH.
He’d handled it well, too. Yes, he’d ultimately let in four goals, three of them from Vasily, but we’dhammeredhim with pucks. He’d made over forty stops tonight, most of those in the second and third periods. In the end, he’d actually made more saves than Hoskins because Everett had a lot more shots on goal than San Francisco.
The loss wasn’t even his fault. He’d been the last line of defense, and the first lines—well, they hadn’t done so hot. The first period had made them think they had the game in the bag, and they’d done what a lot of us did when a win seemed like a sure thing—they’d taken their foot off the gas. And the second period turnaround from us hadn’t been the wakeup callit should’ve been. Or maybe it had caught them all by surprise and they hadn’t been able to recover. Either way, the skaters had been a far bigger problem than the goalie or the fact that there was a top-tier NAPH player on our side.
If the coaches were good at what they did, they’d see that.
If not…
Well, then they’d either be screaming at the team for falling apart, or telling them “Eh, they had Vasily Abashev—we weren’t going to win anyway.”
