I walk up to my locker, and there it is, hanging in my stall like evidence at a crime scene: the white jersey with the red cross. The scarlet letter of sports. It’s been my uniform for months—the athletic equivalent of a dunce cap, except more dignified.
I grab it with the decisive motion of someone ripping off a bandage or deleting their ex’s number and launch it into the hamper. Around me, stick taps echo through the room.
I walk over to the jersey rack and snatch my real jersey—blue, full-contact approved, no warnings required—and something in my chest unclenches.
“There he is!” Dewey exclaims. “Now that’s a sight for sore eyes.”
My shin pads slide on, and suddenly I’m not broken anymore. Just like that: Two pieces of molded plastic against my legs, and I exist again. My body remembers this. It remembers who it was before everything fell apart, before ballet became my reluctant salvation.
“First chance I get,” I inform Dewey while lacing up my skates, “I’m putting you through the boards.”
“Would love to see you try. Welcome it with open arms, Clerky,” he grins then tosses me a roll of white tape.
The coaches hover in the doorway. They’re not convinced yet. Fair. I wouldn’t be either if I’d watched someone limp around in a non-contact jersey for months suddenly claim miraculous recovery via unspecified “alternative therapies.”
On the ice, everything’s familiar but enhanced, like my muscles went to graduate school and graduatedsumma cum laudewhile I wasn’t paying attention. Warm-up laps are supposed to be gentle. Instead, I open up my stride. My edges cut deep into the freshly Zambonied ice.
I’mflying.
Battle drills start the practice—three-on-three, full contact. The puck finds my stick after I fish it out from a scrum. A defender charges at me, but I dodge him with a quick body fake and then in one motion, lean into my stick as I spot an opening over the goalie’s glove. The puck zips off my blade. Top shelf, bar-down, the sound of the crossbar singing its one-note song of victory.
“Holy smokes,” someone says from the bench.
We run through more drills—transitions, breakouts, forechecking—except nothing feels basic anymore. I’m reading ice like sheet music, seeing patterns like choreography. A defenseman steps up to cut my angle, assuming I still move in straight lines like a reasonable player, like the player I used to be. Instead, I pivot with what might be a ghost of a pirouette. The lane opens like curtains at Lincoln Center, and suddenly I’m past him.
“LeClerc!” The assistant coach’s whistle cuts through my transcendent moment. “First power play unit!”
The power play unfolds like a five-man symphony where everyone knows his part.
Me included. Hell, I might as well be the conductor the way I’m orchestrating goal after goal.
After practice, as I bask in the incomparable high that follows my first real hockey session in months, Rocky bursts into the locker room, phone held high. “LeClerc, you seeing this?”
“Seeing what?” I ask, hanging up my skates.
“Social media is losing its mind.” He scrolls with frantic energy. “Reporters were capturing video clips from practice. Nobody knew who was dominating out there. Took them a few minutes to realize it was you.”
He scrolls through his social media feeds. One caption reads: “Is this the same Liam LeClerc from last season?” Another reads: “Looks like someone hit factory reset on his entire game.”
Rocky scrolls through increasingly dramatic hot takes. “Listen to this one: ‘Liam LeClerc looked like someone who forgot he was supposed to be washed up.’”
Rocky grins like he’s personally responsible for my renaissance, like he’s been secretly coordinating this whole thing.
But here’s the thing about renaissance stories: they require an actual performance, not just a really good rehearsal. Practice is one thing. Practice is controlled variables and familiar faces where mistakes dissolve into tomorrow’s corrections, and nobody’s keeping official score. Saturday is something else entirely.
Saturday is my first real game in more than eight months. Saturday’s game is televised on ESPN and onHockey Nightin Canada, which means color commentators throughout North America, on both sides of the border, dissecting every shift while my family watches from their living room, pretending they’re not nervous. Saturday is twenty thousand fans in person, and hundreds of thousands more scattered through the world, who’ve forgotten I exist suddenly remembering my name.
Rocky’s still grinning at his phone, reading tweets like they’re prophecies already fulfilled. The locker room is buzzing, and the boys are ready for me to rejoin the lineup. I want to bottle this feeling, this moment before reality sharpens its teeth. Before Saturday arrives with its cameras and expectations.
The comeback starts now. But the real story? That gets written on Saturday night, in high definition, with color commentary.
Chapter Fourteen
Cooking Russian cuisine requires a confidence I usually reserve for third-period comebacks. But here I am, my apartment transformed into what I’m desperately hoping passes for someone’s babushka’s kitchen. YouTube has been yelling contradictory instructions at me for an hour, and my confidence level hovers somewhere betweenthird-period down by twoandI should’ve just ordered takeout.
When I hear Petra at the door, I have flour dusting my forearms like evidence of crimes against culinary tradition.
“Alright,” she calls out, and I can hear her brain recalibrating as the smell hits her. “I was prepared for a lot of things tonight, but walking into my grandmother’s kitchen was not one of them.”
