The hair on my arms stands up inside my coat.
"Al Michaels asked if we believed in miracles in 1980."
The crowd shifts.
"Cedar Falls—I'm asking you now. Do you believe in miracles?"
The arena comes apart.
The noise isn't a cheer. It's a detonation. It rolls through the arena in a physical wave—I feel it in my ribs, in my teeth, in the soles of my boots on the concrete.
Grace is screaming. Everyone is screaming. The stranger with the scarf is crying, actually crying, and Grace has her arm around him like they're family.
The noise peaks. Starts to settle.
The announcer again: "And worth noting—we've got four NHL players in the building this morning."
Fresh cheers.
"They may be retired, but they’re your hometown boys... Cameron Wilder, Levi Johansen, and Colorado native Ryan Amaral—"
The Jumbotron cuts to the VIP section.
First up: a guy with dark hair and warm skin, his grin so bright like it was designed to make people feel welcome. He waves with both hands, all big-shouldered, Rottweiler charm, and the arena eats it up.
Then a second man: dark hair too, gray eyes, classically handsome in a mischievous way. The nod he gives the camera is so genuinely warm the crowd goes louder for him than they did for the wave.
And then the blond one. Clean-cut, relaxed, the kind of easy, camera-ready charm you only get from someone who talks into microphones for a living. A woman is tucked against his side, and I place her immediately…
I grab Grace’s arm, “That’s the singer… Samantha Eves!”
The noise spikes. Grace and I are jumping.
"—and lastly, one who’s very much still active."
Louder.
"If you haven't already noticed—Weston Prescott is in thebuilding."
"Cedar Falls, let him hear you."
Then the camera holds.
West stands. Waves. That grin—the real one, the one that takes him from intimidating to devastating in half a second.
The crowd chants his name.
And then I see his face on that screen and every other sound stops.
Not figuratively. The arena is still deafening around me, but my brain has selected a priority channel and locked onto it with the ruthless efficiency of a woman who has been denying her feelings for three weeks and just ran out of storage.
West. On a Jumbotron. In Cedar Falls.
InCedar Falls.
Grace's Cedar Falls. The Cedar Falls I am standing in right now at seven-ten on a Sunday morning in February.
Grace grabs my arm. Hard enough to bruise.
