He's a subject, I told myself.He's footage. In three days, you'll fly back to Chicago and never think about him again.
The lie sat heavily on my chest.
I made coffee at midnight because I needed something to do with my hands.
I sat at the desk again.
Find the funny bits, I told myself. That was what the streamer would pay for. Pickle as comic relief, joyful catastrophe. Content that would be shareable and memeable.
I pulled up the practice footage, looking for wipeouts.
I kept getting distracted by other things.
Pickle exploded in his first stride off the mark. His body coiled and released, all that kinetic energy suddenly channeled into speed.
The scrimmage footage started at the hour mark. Five-on-five, half-speed. I'd shot it wide, trying to capture team dynamics.
Pickle was on the second line. Right wing. He started the sequence coasting near the blue line, seemingly uninvolved, chattering at someone off-camera.
Then the play developed.
The opposing center carried the puck up the left side. Standard entry. Two defenders converged. The center looked for a pass across the zone.
Pickle moved.
Not toward the puck—toward where the puck was going to be.
He'd read the play two beats before it happened. While the center was still scanning, Pickle had already abandoned his post and started cutting across the ice at an angle that made no geometric sense.
I slowed the playback to quarter speed.
His edges were immaculate. The crossover that launched him into the lane looked effortless—weight transfer, knee bend, blade angle all calibrated for maximum acceleration. He moved like water finding the fastest path downhill.
The pass came. Pickle was already there.
He intercepted it with his backhand—a micro-adjustment I had to rewind three times to appreciate—and in the same motion, redirected his momentum toward the offensive zone. Two strides and he was at full speed. Three strides and he'd blown past the defender.
The shot came fast. Wrist, not slap. The puck rocketed toward the top corner and clanged off the crossbar.
I froze the frame.
Pickle's follow-through was textbook. Weight forward, stick high, eyes tracking the trajectory.
It wasn't luck. It was hockey. Real hockey. Instinctive, high-IQ play that coaches dreamed about and couldn't teach.
He's good, I thought. Hockey good.
There's a story here, I thought.Not the one they sent me to find.
The streamer wanted funny clips and a relatable disaster. What I was looking at was something else entirely: a player with real talent. A young man whose brilliance kept getting mistaken for luck.
Hog appeared in several clips, knitting on the bench between drills—needles clicking and yarn trailing from his gear bag. In another, he had his hand on the back of Heath's neck, guiding the rookie through a positioning drill with surprising patience.
Heath.
The rookie appeared in a sequence from the passing drill—the one where Pickle had drawn Coach's attention by yelling about Zamboni energy. I'd been focused on Pickle, but the wide-angle caught Heath in the background.
He was falling. His skates went out from under him, and he hit the ice like a baby deer discovering gravity.
