COACH BOUDREAUX: Steal one on the road. That's the whole plan. Steal one and make it a series. We flew down here to work.
Chapter 1: Soucy
The Tampa facility is designed for teams that lose when they play here. Low ceiling. Stalls crammed a foot too close. A support column in the corner that the home club would never tolerate in its own room. My stall is third from the column, so the geometry is wrong before I unzip the bag. I stand in front of it, doing the math of a space designed to make me uncomfortable, and it’s succeeding.
I planned for this. Game 1 of the first round was never going to be at home. Playoff rooms run hot: more bodies, more media in the hallway, more noise sliding under the door every time it opens. The trick is knowing in advance which parts of the sequence the noise will press on and giving those parts extra room, which I did, and it is working, and I would like a small amount of credit for that from someone, someday. I will never ask for it and I will never get it, and that arrangement suits everyone.
Lundy is two stalls down with the crossword folded into eighths, because the crossword travels with us too.
“Eleven across,” he says.
“I don’t have the paper.”
“‘Florida coastal city.’” His pen hovers over the paper. “Eight letters.”
“Sarasota.”
“Could be Key West.”
“Key West is two words and eight letters only if the puzzle counts the space, which it won’t, so it’s Sarasota, and you knew that, and you’re stalling because you don’t want to start the hard part of the page.”
“I’m pacing myself.” He looks up at me and grins.
“It’s a Tuesday.”
“Tuesdays are honest. Low stakes.” He writes it in. “Not everything has to be a Saturday.”
“Some of us like a puzzle that fights back.”
“Some of us don’t need the fight.” The pen moves. He starts tonight; I back him up. This is the arrangement. The arrangement is right. He fills in a Florida coastal city while my hands run the pattern against my thigh without being asked. Thumb to each finger and back.
The room is wrong. I feel it, but can’t tell if it’s the ceiling height, the energy the team has making it to the playoffs, or just a different space than my mind wants to be in. The room is less wrong with him two stalls down though. I do not look at why. There is nothing to look at. He is there. The count holds. The gear goes on in the order it goes on.
“Anybody needs outside this room, now is your chance,” Davis says from the doorway. “I’m not moving for the next forty-five.” He’s appointed himself the door, same as every building. Shoulder to the frame, so the Tampa staff and their cameras stop being a problem before they become one. He’s decided his job tonight, before any of the actual job, is to be a wall between the hallway and my count. Nobody asked him to. Same as the equipment kid turning my bag and bringing juice across a stateline because it’s the only thing he doesn’t have to think about. I notice who moved. I notice what it cost them. I always notice.
Nobody asks me to keep that math. I keep it anyway. Quietly. The way I keep everything.
“You see the panel they ran before the flight?” Marchetti drops onto the bench across the aisle, all knees and motion. “Guy said we were the easiest out left in the field. Said it with his whole chest. Easiest out.”
“We are the easiest out,” Berger says. “On paper. We’re a seven-one seed in a field where everyone else is an eight-six.”
“That’s not a real number.”
“It’s more real than their power play, and I’ll be proven correct.”
“What’s our power play in your fake numbers, then.”
“Nine-two. We’re a nine-two power play the panel refuses to chart because it offends them.”
“We’re twentieth in the league on the power play, Berger.”
“The league doesn’t know what it’s looking at either.” He says it to the ceiling.
“He’s not wrong, though,” Thompson says, lacing up. “On paper. Nobody outside this room thinks we win even one game in this series.”
The flat thing is in my mouth before I weigh it. “He’s right. On paper we’re the easiest out. We should send him a fruit basket for managing our expectations.”
Thompson laughs into his own shoulder. Marchetti points at me like I’ve confessed to a crime. Berger opens his mouth to assign the fruit basket a score, then closes it, because two stalls down Lundy’s pen has stopped and the corner of his mouth has gone up. That’s more interesting to Berger than fruit. Lundy doesn’t look up. He heard it. He always hears it. I go back to the right cuff and let the room close over the quiet I keep in it.
