CHAPTER 18
Overtime
~IRIS~
“And we are live, folks, from the Whitfield Arena, where in just under three minutes the North Star Wolves will host their season-opening exhibition against the visiting Saint Aldwin Knights. A capacity crowd tonight, which is a remarkable showing for a preseason game, and — Jim, this is the part everyone has been waiting on — in net for the Wolves, making her North Star debut, is sophomore-year transferIris O’Shea.
“That is correct, Brian. O’Shea, originally out of West Yorkshire, England, and the first — yes, you heard me, thefirst— Omega goaltender ever rostered to a Division One men’s program at this institution.”
The announcers’ voices come through the rafters of the arena with the warm, overproduced cadence of two men who have practiced the sentence in front of a mirror, and the sound of it travels down through the steel of the crease, up through the blades of my skates, and into the small busy chamber behind my sternum where the entire pre-game machinery of my nervous system has, for the past nineteen minutes, been doing its work.
I am not going to look at the crowd.
I am not going to look at the crowd. I am going to look at the puck. I am going to look at the goal line. I am going to look at the half-circle of paint at my feet and the back-cage of my net and the small precise topography of my own crease, which is, on every rink I have ever stood in, exactly twelve feet of painted floor that nobody else gets to touch unless I let them.
Crease. Pipes. Glove. Blocker. Five-hole closed. Breathe in. Breathe out.
The arena smells of ten thousand things at once. Cold ice and the chemical pine of the disinfectant on the boards. Salted popcorn from the concourse. Hot rubber from the warming pucks. Beer in plastic cups. The layered citrus-and-cologne fog that drifts off any sold-out crowd. Underneath it all, on the home bench at my one o’clock, the unmistakable triple-stacked scent signature of three Alphas I have started to recognize as a unit before I have seen them — amber bourbon, burnt-orange espresso, pine and snow — grounding the whole electric chemistry of the room in something I do not, by any rational measure, have the right to find this calming.
Goalies. Focus.
I let my eyes drift to the stands. Just for one second. Just a sweep. Just to confirm we are, as I suspected, drawing a crowd.
We are.
And the part of the crowd that knocks the breath sideways in my chest, briefly, is the small constellation of Omegas dotted through the lower bowl in numbers I have not, in my entire career, seen at a men’s hockey game before. A girl in a knit beanie in section twelve. A pair of older women in matching North Star scarves directly behind the home bench. A row of college-aged Omegas with painted faces and homemade signs in section nine.
They came.
They actually came.
Two days ago you were a tagged TikTok clip of a girl in pads doing a top-shelf glove save and a kid named @hockeygirly_22 stitched you with the caption THIS IS THE OMEGA WE HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR. Two-point-one million views by Sunday lunch. Most of the comments crying. A nontrivial percentage of them screaming.
It had caught me utterly off guard on my own couch on Sunday night. I had been on the very far end of an evening doom-scroll, the kind you promise yourself is fifteen minutes and that turns into ninety, when the algorithm had served me, with neither warning nor mercy, a thirty-second video of myself in full pads making a glove-hand save in the corner of practice last Tuesday, the lighting somehow so flattering it had pulled my cheekbones and the line of my jaw and the angle of the catch into something that looked, frankly, professionally engineered to make a teenage Omega want to play goalie. The boys had been hysterically proud of it. Matteo had texted me a screenshot of his story repost within ninety seconds. Rémi had simply sent the wordbadass.Jude had not commented for an hour, and then had texted,brand.Just the one word.
And tonight, a few hundred Omegas have shown up to a North Star exhibition game who would not, six months ago, have considered the building a place that wanted them in it.
Goalie. Focus. Crease. Pipes.
The puck drops.
And, for the first ten minutes of regulation, I am playing a perfectly competent, perfectly forgettable game of professional hockey, the kind of game a half-decent goalie plays in a half-decent crease at the start of any season-opener, while every man in a blue pinnie on my own bench openly roots against me.
Not loud. They are not stupid. Loud would put it on a clip.
Just constant. A muttered chirp every time I drop into the butterfly. A snort when I tracking-save a shot that did notdeserve a save anyway. A theatrical eye-roll from Brennan every time the lane in front of my net clears and I have not done anything cinematic with the opportunity. The half of my own team that I am ostensibly defending the back of has, by the eight-minute mark, become a small private peanut gallery, and I am letting it slide off me because I have been a girl in a boys’ league since I was nine years old and I have, by now, an industrial-grade callus where another goalie’s feelings would be.
Twelve minutes into the first, a Saint Aldwin winger snaps a shot from the top of the circle. Routine. Should be a save. I drop, I close, I get the pad on it.
Except I do not.
The puck slides under my left pad on the ice, hits the post, and rolls in, in the small undignified way pucks roll in only on the goals that will end up on the highlight reel of your worst games for the rest of your career.
One-nothing. Saint Aldwin.
Brennan, on the bench, smirks. He does not need to say a word. The smirk is the sentence.
Oh, no. Oh, no, you absolute donkey, that was a stoppable puck, get up.
