The last draw. The clock. The horn.
The building comes back all at once, two hours of held breath let go in a sound I feel in my teeth. The bench is already over the boards. Series in five. Round done.
Davis hits me first, helmet to helmet. "We got 'em. Lundy. We got 'em."
"We got 'em."
Marchetti's next, both gloves gone, taped wrist around my neck. "The toe save. Did you see the toe save? Of course you didn't, you made it, you made it with your foot."
"That's usually how the foot ones go."
"Don't be reasonable. Not tonight. Nobody is reasonable tonight, it's a rule."
"It's a good rule," Davis says, arriving again, because in a pile you arrive more than once. "Where's the goalie. Somebody find the goalie."
"Twenty-eight saves," somebody yells.
"It was twenty-six."
"It's a hundred now. It grows in the retelling, that's the deal, you don't get a say."
The pile builds the way piles build. By accretion. Somewhere in the middle of it there's a body coming across the ice that I'd find in any crowd in any building, the one that maps every room before it'll enter. He comes into me without the half-step. Without the redraw. Without the careful eighteen inches that lived in front of his hands all season. He just comes, helmet against my helmet, glove fisted in the front of my jersey, no recalibration anywhere in it. That's the whole thing, inside a celebration nobody in this barn is reading but me.
"You played the save in front of you," he says into the cage, my own line, his now. "Every one of them."
"You were watching."
"I'm always watching. It's a depth chart." His mouth does the almost-thing, the full one this time, and the pile folds over us and takes it where no one can see.
Berger catches me on the way to the handshake line and grabs both my shoulders. "Seven to one. They had us seven to one to lose this round."
"You had us seven to one, Berger."
"It was the model. The model was wrong. Do you understand what I'm telling you. The model was wrong and it's the best day of my life."
The handshake line still gets me. Two teams that spent a week trying to end each other's seasons lined up to touch hands andmean it. Their goalie finds me at the end and taps my pads with his blocker.
"Good series. Go win the next one."
"You made me earn all of it."
"I know. That's the only part that helps." And we let go and skate to opposite ends of what comes next.
The room is a flood, the speaker going before half of us are through the door.
"Two more rounds like that and I'm dead," Davis announces, a goalie stick raised over his head like a sword. "I'm dead and I love it."
"Tell me you saw the toe save," Marchetti says, to the ceiling. "I need somebody to tell it back to me."
"Everyone saw it, Marchetti," Thompson says, dropping onto the bench beside me, soaked.
"I want it as a story. With a beginning."
"Once upon a time Lundy made a toe save and we made the second round," Davis says. "The end. Berger, where's the parade route."
"There's no parade for the second round."
"You said that about every round."
