The guys are looking at me now. Sweaty, breathing hard, waiting.
I look at the ice. I’ve been looking at it for fifty-six minutes. I know where their defense is leaning, I know which of their forwards is a step slow in the third because he always is, I know exactly which lane has been open all night and hasn’t been used yet because we keep running the same sets out of habit.
“Their right side,” I say. “Sixteen keeps cheating toward the middle when he’s tired. He’s been doing it since the second period and we haven’t gone at him yet.” I look at Shep. “If we move the puck fast up the left wall and you time the cut—”
“I cut to the back door,” Shep says, and his eyes are sharp in a way they get sometimes that reminds me he’s a better player than he lets on most of the time.
“You’ll have a step on him.” I look at Duff. “We need it to be fast. No hesitation.”
Duff looks at the clipboard. Looks at me. Looks at the ice.
“Do it,” he says.
Once the timeout ends. We take the faceoff.
I won’t pretend the next ninety seconds is clean or elegant or the kind of hockey you draw up on a whiteboard and execute perfectly. It’s a puck battle behind the net and a blocked shot and a scramble in the neutral zone and Holden making a pass he probably shouldn’t have attempted that somehow works anyway. But the puck moves up the left wall fast, the way I said, and their sixteen is a step slow cutting back, the way I said, and Shep reads it—times the cut exactly right, hits the back door at full speed—
The shot goes in.
The building detonates.
I feel it in my chest before I hear it—that specific concussive wave of two thousand people reacting at the same moment, the sound arriving half a second after the physical impact of it. The red light is on. The horn is going. The bench has cleared before I’ve fully processed what happened.
Shep is already doing the lap.
I don’t know where the road flares came from. I genuinely do not know how he got road flares onto the ice or when he had time to acquire them or how any of this was approved by anyone in any position of authority, but there he is—Shep Sawyer, both arms extended, a flare burning red in each hand, skating the fastest, loudest, most committed victory lap I have ever witnessed in a professional hockey context.
“WOOOOOOO!”
It echoes off the rafters. It probably echoes off the marquee outside. It is the sound of a man who has been building toward this moment all season and is absolutely not going to let it pass without full documentation.
And pyrotechnics.
Slammy appears from the tunnel—I have no idea how Slammy got back into skates this fast—and joins the lap. The crowd is on its feet. The scoreboard shows a bunch of emoji graphics that the AV team clearly prepared in advance, which means someone believed this was going to happen, which means something about this team that I’m only now starting to understand.
I stand at the edge of the celebration and let myself feel it.
Not manage it. Not catalog it for later processing. Just feel it—the win, the play, the fact that Coach Duff asked me what I see and I told him and it worked. The fact that it worked not because I controlled every variable but because I trusted Shep to time the cut and Holden to make the pass and the guys to execute a strategy I called with ninety seconds and no whiteboard.
Three months ago, I would have been drawing up that play myself and putting myself in Shep’s position because trusting someone else to execute meant giving up control.
Three months ago, I couldn’t name what I was feeling on a Post-it note.
I look up into section 112.
She’s on her feet. Both hands over her mouth. Eyes bright in the arena light. She’s not looking at the lap or at Slammy or at the scoreboard. She’s looking at me, at the spot where I’m standing just outside the celebration, and she sees the thing I’m feeling—I know she sees it because she’s always seen it, she’s been seeing it since before I could admit it was there.
I tap my chest once, quick, where nobody else would notice.
She drops one hand from her mouth and does the same thing back.
Then Shep completes his lap and crashes into me from behind with the full force of a man who has been waiting all season for something worth celebrating. The team pile-on begins, and I go under in a tangle of jerseys and pads and Shep still somehow holding one of the road flares. I am laughing—actually laughing, in the middle of it, with my team—for the first time in longer than I can remember.
First of eight.
Seven to go.
Tale Of Two Cities
