Ryan
Iwatch the Houston clip for the fourth time in the darkened film room and hate it more every loop.
The hit looks worse slowed down.
Everything does.
My first stride. The exact second my stick comes up. The ref’s arm. The bench rising behind me like a wave with no plan except impact.
Coach Sully freezes the frame before I reach the scrum.
“Tell me what you see.”
Nobody answers right away.
The room smells like stale coffee, cold gear, and men trying not to say the thing that would start a fight before ten in the morning. A few guys still have wet hair from the skate. Someone keeps clicking the cap on a marker until Roman reaches back without looking and takes it out of his hand.
I sit in the front row with my elbows on my knees.
“Bad angle,” one of the rookies says finally.
Evan McKinney snorts from the back. “Generous.”
I do not turn. “You have something useful?”
“Yeah. If we’re going to watch you lose your mind in slow motion, can we at least admit why it happened at normal speed?”
The room shifts. Evan can change the air with one sentence and then look bored by the weather.
Coach Sully clicks the remote against his palm. “Go on.”
Evan leans back, arms folded. “They’d been hacking Finn for two periods. We kept trying to look disciplined. They kept hearing polite.”
“So you wanted a bench brawl,” Roman says.
“I wanted them to stop taking runs at our goalie.”
“I wanted that too,” I say.
“Could’ve fooled me before the third.”
Several heads turn. A rookie stares very hard at his own shoes.
I finally look back. Evan’s expression is lazy. His eyes are not.
“You think I let it happen?”
“I think you tried to manage it until there wasn’t anything left to manage.”
The line hits because it is close enough to the truth to bruise. I feel it and give nothing back.
Coach Sully clears his throat. “Good. Now we’re talking hockey instead of therapy. Clip two.”
The screen changes to the game from last night. My blocked shot. Evan’s goal. The late third-period read when Evan wanted the empty net and I sent him back. Coach lets that play twice.
“This,” Sully says, “is what it looks like when we keep our edge and still use our brains.”
Evan tips his chair back. “My edge got us the goal.”
