The team moves toward the door in a wave of noise and momentum, and I move with them because there is nothing else to do. I pull my helmet on. I grip my stick. I walk out of that locker room and down the tunnel toward the ice, and I put one foot in front of the other.
The crowd noise hits when we reach the ice.
Denver's crowd. They’re loud and hostile and completely indifferent to the fact that the world just rearranged itself inside my chest.
I step onto the ice.
I take one stride and then another and find no rhythm. Find nothing clean. The familiar recalibration doesn't come — the body that always knows what it's here for has lost the signal completely. I do a lap that feels like moving through water. Myedges feel wrong. My arm throbs, reminding me where it broke. Everything that was sharp twenty minutes ago has gone distant and dull and unreachable.
Win this one for Cody?
I’d rather die.
The first period is a disaster.
Not visibly — not at first. We come out structured enough, the systems held by muscle memory alone, but the engine behind it is missing. I'm half a step slow in every decision. Not thinking ahead, not reading, just reacting — and reaction is always too late.
Hudson wins the first three face-offs, and I watch it happen like I'm viewing it from somewhere above the ice. Silas is sharp, doing everything right, but he needs me to move first, and I'm not moving first. I'm waiting. Running something else through my head on a loop while Denver builds pressure, we should be cutting off before it reaches our zone.
Evan scores on a transition play in the seventh minute.
Exactly the way I said he would.
I said watch his shoulders. I saw the shoulders. I was standing in the perfect position to cut the lane, but I didn't move in timebecause I was thinking about how much of a shame it would be not to win this one for Cody.
Beckett skates past me on the way back to center ice. He doesn't say anything, doesn't look at me. Just goes.
He knows me well.
Every time Coach wants to make a special dedication, I won’t be on my game.
Andrew comes after Beckett exactly the way I predicted — a hit behind our net, late and deliberate, designed to send a message. Beckett takes it clean, keeps the puck and skates away, and that's the right play, the smart play. I watch it happen from the wrong side of the ice because my positioning has been off since the first shift.
Caleb covers for me twice without making it obvious.
I notice. I don't thank him. I just try to find something — any thread of the game, any moment of clarity — that gets me back inside the play instead of watching it from somewhere slightly outside my own body.
It doesn't come.
Hudson scores on a power play midway through the second –– a clean shot, well-set-up, the kind of goal that happenswhen a defense isn't communicating. Caleb and I weren't communicating. I knew it in real time and couldn't fix it.
The score is 2-0 going into the third, and the Denver crowd is alive in a way that fills the arena and presses down on everything.
Silas scores in the third — a good goal, a Silas goal, pure will and positioning — and for approximately ninety seconds I think we might be able to claw something back. Owen hits the post. Beckett draws a penalty that we don't convert because Miles reads it exactly the way I told Isaac he would, and I forgot to tell our shooters to adjust.
Denver adds one more on the empty net.
Final score: Denver 3, Washington 1.
The buzzer sounds, and I stand at center ice for a moment while both teams clear and the crowd celebrates around me, and I look at the ice — marked and scratched and rutted from sixty minutes of play — and I feel something that I don't usually let myself feel.
Responsible.
Not for losing a hockey game.
For all of it.
The locker room after the loss is the quiet kind.
