Better than flying across the country every time I’m worried about my wife, though.
As we finish dressing, I take a second to look around at my teammates. We don’t always agree about life or politics or whether our coach is a fucking asshole. But we’ve played some very good hockey together.
“All right boys.” I grab a marker and write $10,000 on the board. “Let’s make them welcome us back to their barn for game five.”
The dressing room door swings open and my dad walks in. He takes one look at the pledge I’ve put up and nods firmly. “All right.”
“What are you doing here?”
He waves the lineup card at me.
My entire life has been constructed around moments like this. The brotherhood of the team, the mentorship of older players. My family and hockey are inextricably linked, and in pushing back against Wilson and driving him to a leave of absence, I created fractures both seen and unseen in the hockey world.
But not in my family.
I grin. “Yeah, boss, tell us who’s playing.”
My dad takes a deep breath and booms out our captain first. “At center, we’ve got Jonas.”
As one, my team all claps.
“At left wing, Lego.”
This clap gets a cheer with it, too.
“On the right…Coop.”
Clap.
“On D we’ve got Toth—”Clap. “And Cherry.”Clap.“And in net, let’s go Suovi!”
The clapping and cheering peaks for our back up goalie, who’s getting his first start of the series.
Jonas stands. “You heard him, let’s fucking go.”
With a clatter of sticks and helmets, we file into the wide hallway. Stevo and Jonas both stop to talk to their kids in the space where family waits, and while they’re doing that, my dad claps me on the shoulder.
“Leave it all on the ice, son.”
“I will.”
“I mean it, Logan.” His grip tightens, through my protective gear. He turns me to look at him. His brow wrinkles. “Leave iton the ice. Everything before tonight. When you step out there, be this new man that you are, fully. The best way to honor the fans here is to give them that.”
It’s a slow starting game. After three wins in a row, Hamilton is finally showing some fatigue, and the assistant coach running the lines tonight mixes up our forward group in ways that play to our strengths.
So they don’t score first, but we don’t score either.
It’s a frustrating pace. Every shift that I’m on, I’m pushing as hard as I can. As soon as I’m back on the bench, I’m bombarded by the sounds of fans.
They’re frustrated, too.
They’ve been watching us fail for fifteen years.
And for two thirds of that time, they’ve been waiting for me to do something miraculous. It’s a common narrative among sports writers that a player puts a team on his back and carries them across the finish line, but hockey doesn’t actually work that way. Not forever.
I pulled off a superhuman second half of the season, but I’ve fallen back to mortal numbers here in the playoffs.
“Lego, Stevo, Fish…”
