I know.
Where the tunnel narrowed, Heath fell into step beside me. His shoulder brushed mine, contact not collision.
The announcer's voice climbed. The tunnel opened into light and noise.
We stepped onto the ice.
For Game 7, everything nonessential fell away. Shifts ran thirty-five, forty seconds. You came off before your legs failed because tired legs made decisions your brain couldn't fix.
Nashville played heavy and disciplined. The soft ice worked for them, slowing transitions and turning the game into a war of attrition that rewarded structure over speed.
The first two periods were scoreless. The ice deteriorated into fog and ruts. You adjusted or you fell.
I ran my shifts cleanly. My body did what it always did: anticipated and executed. My body's machinery operated at top efficiency.
Underneath, I was tracking Heath. Where he was. How he absorbed hits. Whether his stride had shortened from fatigue or from the ribs he'd been protecting since Game 4.
The third period opened, still scoreless. Our line went out for the fourth shift. Cross at center. Heath on the left. I took the right circle.
Cross was at the dot. Faceoff. Puck dropped.
Cross lost it. Their center pulled it back to the point. Wrister through traffic. Pratt kicked it wide. Rebound to the corner.
Our defenseman got there first. Sealed their forward. Swept the puck behind the net. Cross collected. Cycled low.
I read the lane before it opened.
Their weak-side defenseman was cheating toward the boards. The same tendency Heath had spotted on the plane after Game 3:he leaves the back door if we sell the net drive and pull up.The gap between the D-man's inside hip and the far post was six feet wide and closing.
I carried through the high slot. Drew coverage. Their forward committed a half-step, which was everything.
The pass was instinctual.
The puck left my blade through a seam that existed for less than a second, finding the only lane to the crease where a body was about to be.
Heath was already there.
Full commitment. Stick flat. Their defenseman leaned on him, two hundred and twelve pounds of resistance, and Heath absorbed the weight, keeping his blade on the ice.
The puck caught his stick at an angle that turned the pass into a redirect. It tumbled, knuckling past the goalie's blocker and into the net.
Red light. Horn.
The whole place went vertical. Sound moved through the foundation, up through the ice, and into my skeleton. Nineteen thousand people standing. Glass shaking.
I reached him first.
I hit him at the crease and caught his shoulders. He held on to mine. We collided, and our foreheads pressed together through our visors, close enough to see the sweat at his temple and the freckles.
Half a second too long.
We both knew. Neither broke first.
The pile arrived. Cross from behind. Rook's glove on my helmet. Varga's voice shredding through everything—"GET IN HERE, THIS IS HISTORY, I CALLED THIS, I CALLED THIS WEEKS AGO—"
The replay looped overhead. Three angles. The pass. The redirect. And then: the two of us, visors up, locked together at the crease edge while the pile built around us.
Later, the commentators would call it chemistry.
