The rest of the pre-game is a blur of getting geared up and focused. Before I know it, it’s game time.
The roar hits me the moment my skates touch ice. It’s that singular sound of twenty thousand people collectively deciding to care about what happens next. My heart responds by trying to escape through my chest and burst out from my jersey.
On my first shift, the puck finds me in the neutral zone, Dewey’s pass landing on my tape like a promise. I push forward, legs firing with new strength, hands working the puck with muscle memory enhanced by months of diligent, painful practice. The first defender steps up, angling for the hit. I fake left, shift right, drag the puck outside his reach—smooth, instinctive, exactly like I’ve done a thousand times.
I’m flying. I’m back. I’m—
BOOM!
The word “blindsided” was invented for this moment. The Pioneers’ defenseman levels me. My head snaps back, and suddenly I’m studying the arena lights from a horizontal position.
The ice is cold. This is news to nobody, but lying on it while twenty thousand people gasp gives it a new quality. Let’s call it “humbling.”
So, this is game speed. This is what I forgot while I was doinggrand battements.
The whistle blows as the puck deflects into the stands. It was a clean hit. I peel myself off the ice.
Next shift, I’m determined to make something happen, to prove that my marquee appearance isn’t false advertising. The puck bounces free in our defensive zone, and I pounce on it, ready to start the breakout that leads to the goal that validates everything.
Instead, two Pioneers forwards collapse on me. I try to spin out, to fight through, but I can’t.
Every play is just slightly off. Every pass arrives a half-second after I need it. Every stride puts me a fraction behind where the game is happening. My lungs are on fire, and my legs have decided they’re made of increasingly heavy concrete.
I skate back to the bench. The truth settles in with all the comfort of a freezing cold shower: I’m not bad. I’m keeping up, making plays, not embarrassing myself. But I’m not impacting anything. I’m a passenger in my own comeback story.
The game drags on, with little offense from either side. The crowd’s energy, once ravenous in the first period, subsides as the game lurches on. Without much to cheer for, the arena is relatively quiet as the final buzzer sounds on a 1–1 tie.
The marquee outside promised a return. What they got was a guy who used to be good trying to remember how to be good again. The distance between those two things feels like the space between here and Saint Petersburg, where tomorrow Petra will be starting her new life while I’m here, still trying to reclaim my old one.
Game shape, it turns out, is like speaking a language. You can study all the grammar, memorize the vocabulary, practice pronunciation until your tongue bleeds. But until you’re dropped into a country where that’s all they speak, where the words come at you fast and colloquial and unforgiving, you’re just a tourist with a phrase book.
I need reps. Games. Time. All the things I don’t have enough of.
The locker room is quiet afterward, that specific post-tie silence that’s neither victory nor defeat, just a collective shrug. Dewey pats me on my shoulder pad as he passes, and I know he wants to say something encouraging, but we don’t have a language for that. We have chirps for success and silence for everything else.
As we get changed, Rocky walks over and shows me his phone—more tweets about my return, some positive, some asking if I’ve lost a step, some wondering if the injury changed me permanently. I don’t read them all. I already know what they say because I’m thinking the same things.
But here’s what they don’t know: returning isn’t a single moment. It’s not one game or one shift or one play. It’s showing up every day and doing the work even when the marquee lights are off, and nobody’s watching.
The bruises from tonight will be purple by morning. They’ll map themselves across my ribs like watercolor clouds, tender reminders that I’m competing where I should be, on the ice with my boys. There’s a peculiar satisfaction in pressing the bruises after they form—that sharp bloom of pain that saysyes, you werethere; you took the hit; you got back up.It’s the body’s scoreboard. Each ache is proof of effort. Tomorrow, when I catalog them in the mirror, they’ll hurt like hell and somehow feel so, so good.
Chapter Sixteen
I step out of Madison Square Garden, and the steel door thuds behind me. The night air hits my damp skin like a reminder that the world keeps spinning even when your comeback story stumbles in the second act.
The electricity I felt walking in—that main character energy, that marquee-worthy confidence—has evaporated. Now I’m just another guy in the City of Dreams.
A kid stands near the players’ exit, maybe ten or eleven, clutching a Sharpie and a Sentinels jersey. He’s getting an autograph from one of my teammates, eyes wide with that particular worship reserved for people who do impossible things on ice. I know that look. I used to wear it, waiting outside arenas, believing that proximity to greatness might be contagious.
The kid sees me and hesitates, as if deciding whether to approach. Then—he turns away.
Doesn’t ask. Doesn’t reach out. Just pivots like I’m scenery.
My name was on the marquee. The return was hyped. But after that performance? I’m not the guy kids stay out late to meet.
I start walking uptown. My body needs to move, needs to process this feeling.
Seventh Avenue stretches ahead, all flashing billboards and late-night food carts, the smell of falafel and street pretzels mixing with the subway steam smell that emanates through the grates in the sidewalk. The city that usually feels like fuel now just feels loud. The honking cabs, the bar laughter, the general Manhattan chaos—it all presses in, making me feel smaller, like I’m shrinking into my own irrelevance.
