OPEN ICE
Darius
Game seven.
This is what everything comes down to, the place you either become a legend or spend the next fifty years rerunning what you could have done different.
They call it a sold-out crowd but it feels like every motherfucker who’s ever wanted a piece of me is here, the air inside the barn humid with beer, anxiety, and the sticky heat of ten thousand bodies screaming their heads off for blood.
We line up in the tunnel, shoulder to shoulder.
Every guy on the roster is twitching with nerves, but you can tell who’s ready and who’s already writing their own obituary. Marcus spits on the concrete, slaps the back of his glove three times against the wall.
Tommy is dead silent, jaw working a piece of tape into shreds.
Ash is next to him, helmet on, chin already dripping with sweat even though we haven’t stepped on the ice yet, the cut above his eyebrow from last round puckered like a second mouth.
When the doors open, the noise is a single, unified roar, like standing too close to a jet on takeoff.
The arena’s done up in blackout towels, blue and silver, everyone waving them at once so it looks like the world is a blizzard. We skate the lap. I take my net, draw the crease with the tip of my stick.
Ash does his tap-tap on the boards and the sound cuts through the noise like a bullet.
The other team is already lined at the blue, their jerseys freshly laundered, the look in their eyes not fear but contempt. Kruchten, their captain, stares at me like he’s got the next three hours scheduled in his calendar, break us, break me, hoist the cup over my corpse.
We’re the home team, so we get the last change. Coach starts me with the line I’ve played with all year, Tommy and O’Doul on D, Ash at left wing, Raz at center, and Kai, because he’s the only one who can keep up with Ash’s tempo.
The puck drops and it’s a car crash from the first shift, everyone finishing checks, every faceoff a fistfight that just happens to include a puck.
Kruchten is shadowing Ash from the opening second, talking constant shit. At the first whistle, he skates up beside him and leans in close.
Even from sixty feet away, I can read his lips. “Does your boyfriend suck as hard as you do?”
Ash doesn’t flinch. He just grins, gums red, and chirps back. “He benches more than you. And he fucks harder, too.” I catch it, because that’s who I am, always watching, always processing, the guy who never blinks first.
The first period is all nerves, tight passes, nobody wanting to make the fuckup that gets them in the highlight reel for the wrong reason. I see every play two seconds before it happens, the patterns burned into my brain.
The Titans dump and chase, the same as every other game, trying to get bodies in front of me and bang in the garbage goals.
I stonewall three shots in the first minute, each one a little harder than the last. My pads are already humming with the impact.
On the bench, between whistles, the talk is quiet. Tommy whispers, “Watch the weak side, they’re cheating high.” Ash stares at the ice, jaw working, and I know he’s thinking about what Kruchten said, but also about the next shift, the next opening, the next moment he can turn the knife.
On the ice, everything is noise and color, but in the crease, time slows. I can see every bead of sweat, every flash of stick blade, the way the puck skitters on the fresh ice.
Second shift, Ash takes a stretch pass, beats two defenders wide, cuts inside, and gets tripped. No call. He slams into the boards, pops up, and skates to the bench like nothing happened.
Then it’s my turn.
A turnover at the blue, Kruchten with a two-on-one, every muscle in my body firing at once as I shuffle post-to-post, reading the pass, watching his eyes.
He tries to go short side, glove high, but I snatch it out of the air and hold it for the cameras, just to let him know who’s in charge. He bangs his stick on the ice so hard the blade snaps.
The crowd eats it up.
But in my head, I’m only watching Ash, every time he takes a shift, every time he gets lined up for a hit, every time he dangles a defender and then laughs about it on the way back to the bench.
Halfway through the period, we get our first power play. Coach yells for Ash to double-shift. He lines up at the half-wall, hair plastered to his forehead, eyes alive.
