“I could tell you what it felt like,” I say. “I just couldn’t say it out loud.”
He looks at me. “Can you now?”
I think about a purple Post-it note. About a woman in section 112 who drove to my rink on a Tuesday morning because someone told her to keep going. About the specific weight of herhand in mine on the walk to the car and how it doesn’t feel like a risk anymore. It just feels like the thing I come home to.
“Yeah,” I say. “I can now. And I wouldn’t even be lying.”
Shep nods once. Then he ruins it by adding: “Emotional growth arc complete. I expect some kind of certificate.”
“Get on the ice, Sawyer.”
The second period is better.
We find our game somewhere in the first five minutes—the passing starts to click, the positioning holds, and the guys stop thinking quite so hard about what’s at stake and start thinking about hockey, which is always when we play well. Springfield is still good. They score at eight minutes on a shot that beats Gage clean off a defensive breakdown that I’m already filing away for film review.
We’re down one. There are thirty-two minutes left.
I don’t panic.
That’s the part that’s new. The old version of me would have pulled the reins so tight the guys couldn’t breathe. Would have gotten into it with Coach Duff. Would have called every play, micromanaged every line change, tried to personally control the outcome through sheer force of will.
Instead I get on the ice and I play my game and I trust the people around me.
Holden ties it at twelve minutes off a feed from Heath that’s one of the cleaner plays we’ve run all season. The bench erupts. I feel it in my chest—not just relief, but something bigger. Pride, maybe, in what these guys have become.
We go into the third period tied.
There’s one minute left in regulation when Coach Duff calls timeout.
The building is vibrating. I can feel it in the ice under my skates, in the boards when I lean against them, in the bones of arink that has been home to this team for thirty years and knows what’s at stake tonight.
Coach looks at the clipboard. Looks at the ice. Looks at me.
“Foster. What do you see.”
He does this sometimes now—asks instead of tells. I don’t think he’d describe it that way. I don’t think he’s consciously decided to change his approach. But something shifted in this room over the past few months, and whatever it is, it lives in moments like this one.
I look at the ice.
Their left defenseman has been cheating toward the boards for the last six minutes, anticipating a play we keep almost running. Their center is a step slow recovering after the last sequence—not injured, just tired in the third period the way tiresome players get tired when the game has been going this long.
There’s a lane. It’s been there for four minutes and nobody’s used it yet because we keep running the play we rehearsed instead of the play that’s actually available.
“Their left side is open,” I say. “Seventeen’s been cheating for the last two shifts. If we move it fast through the neutral zone and Shep times the cut—”
“Back door,” Shep says immediately as he winks. After all, that’s his specialty.
I don’t like to think about what that could mean outside this rink.
“You’ll have two steps on him.”
Coach looks at the board. Looks at me. Nods once.
“Do it clean,” he says.
The play takes eleven seconds from the drop of the puck. I won’t remember all of it later—memory does strange things in certain moments, compresses and blurs and keeps only the images that matter. What I’ll remember is the puck moving fastthrough the neutral zone the way I called it. Holden making the pass he wasn’t sure he could make. The lane opening up exactly where I said it would.
And Shep.
