And for the first time in my life, I’m not bracing for the moment it falls apart.
I’m just... here. Present. Choosing this.
Choosing him.
It’s enough. It’s more than enough.
It’s everything.
My phone buzzes on the nightstand.
Shep: TWO WINS. TWO WINS AND WE’RE IN. SOMEONE HOLD ME.
Boone: Nobody is holding you Shep
Shep: EMOTIONAL SUPPORT HOLD. IT’S DIFFERENT.
I read the thread twice, smiling at the ceiling while Bennett sleeps beside me with his arm across my waist and his face completely unguarded in the morning light.
Two wins.
They’re going to get there. I know this the way I know his coffee order and the specific look on his face when he’s finally letting himself feel a real emotion.
They’re going to get there.
And I’m going to be in the stands for every single one.
The Night We Earned It
Bennett
There’s a point, right before everything changes, when hope stops being something you manage and starts being something you claim. Not carefully. Not quietly. Loud, messy, undeniable—the kind that fills an arena and rattles the boards and dares anyone to pretend it isn’t real. But the best part isn’t the win. It’s what happensafter. The moment someone doesn’t look for the nearest exit or the safest distance, but instead goes exactly where they’ve always wanted to be. And if you’ve done it right, if you’ve really done the work? That’s the part that feels the most like home.
Playlist: “All Fired Up” – Pat Benatar
The arena is loud before we even take the ice.
Not the polite, hopeful loud of a team whose fans have learned to manage expectations. This is different. This is a packed house. Four thousand people who have been waiting all season for permission to believe in something, and tonight they’ve decided they’re not waiting anymore. The noise hits me in the tunnel like a physical thing—warm and enormous and completely indifferent to the fact that we still have to go out there and earn it.
One win. That’s all we need.
The Springfield Coyotes are good. They’ve been good all season, the kind of team that executes cleanly and makes very few mistakes and doesn’t care at all about the narrative weight of what this game means to a small Minnesota town that put a countdown board in a bar two weeks ago. They’re going to come out hard, and we’re going to have to be better than we’ve been all season for sixty minutes.
I know we can do it.
That’s the thing that’s different tonight. I know—not in the white-knuckled, force-it-into-existence way I used to knowthings, but in the way you know things when you’ve actually done the work. I’ve watched this team gel together for three months. I know what they’re capable of when they stop playing scared. I know what Shep looks like when he’s locked in and what Holden does when the game opens up and exactly which of Gage’s pre-game rituals indicate he’s going to have a big night.
Gage has completed all of them. Twice.
We’re going to be fine.
“Cap.” Shep appears at my elbow in the tunnel, vibrating at a frequency I’ve only seen from him a handful of times. His eyes are too bright. He’s been this way since warmups. “How do you feel?”
“Ready.”
“Scale of one to ten.”
“Ready doesn’t have a scale, Shep.”
