“Walk me through their looks,” Lundy says when the noise drifts off down the room. The pen is down now. He’s looking at the crossword and but not really.
This one matters, so I find the words for it. “Their second power play runs everything through the left-shot D-man at the point. He’s not a shooter, he’s a passer pretending to be a shooter, which is worse, because the whole unit is built on you believing the shot. He winds up, you drop, the puck’s already gone low to the bumper. Eleven power plays in the three games I watched. He faked the one-timer nine times and shot it twice. Clean zone time, it’s a pass. Scramble, then he shoots.”
“So I read the entry, not the windup.”
“You read the entry. Give him the point shot, because it isn’t coming. Their first unit’s the reverse. First unit you respect everything. Number seventeen is a real shot off the top of the circle, and he beats you clean if you cheat the pass even once.”
“They forecheck?”
“Hard. First man’s on our defense before the puck settles. So don’t expect clean breakouts in front of you. Expect us rushed, expect the puck coming back at you off a turnover.”
“So we make the first man wrong.”
“We make the first man wrong, or we eat it on the wall all night. Either way it’s our skaters’ problem before it’s yours. By the time it reaches you it’s a scramble, and you already know what they do in a scramble.”
“Twenty-two shoots.”
“Now you’ve got it.” I peel another length of tape. “Nine though, he lives in your blue paint, doesn’t tip much, screens, and he’s big enough that Davis isn’t moving him off the spot. You’re finding your looks around a body all night. Fight for sightline when it’s worth it, let the rest go. You see it late, you see it late.”
“What about their goalie? Give me something to hate.”
“He’s good high, cheats his glove early. Our shooters want it low blocker, far pad. That’s their problem, though. Yours is nine in your paint and twenty-two working Gertie’s side every shift.” I set the roll down beside the pad, where it goes. “So tell her. She should know it’s coming.”
“You want me to brief the goalpost on Tampa’s power play?”
“She likes to be prepared.”
The corner of his mouth goes the whole way. “I’ll let her know.” He fills a word in, then looks up. The look is steadier than the joke was. “Three games of their second unit, Souce. We barely see their second unit half the night.”
“I watched three games of everything.”
“Of course you did.” He says it warm, no edge to it. He’s called the left post Gertie and the right one Quessa since the second week of camp. I gave him the names and he never once asked me what I meant by it. Most things about me arrive in front of people as a problem to solve. He took two names and put them in his mouth like they were the most obvious things in the room.
Warmups are warmups. The ice cuts different under visiting blades. Southern buildings keep the sheet soft, and the edges come a half-second late until my legs find it. Two loops in a building that boos us. A third loop at three-quarter because the hamstring asked. Shots from the second unit then we come off the ice.
Finally, we are back out for the anthem and the puck drop. The barn comes down on us like weather, thousands of people who would like us gone in four short games. I’m at the end of the away bench where I belong, mask by my side, watching the only thing on this ice worth my full attention.
Lundy. I’ve studied Lundy for four years, on game replays for a few years and from a bench for another, before this team even had a logo. There’s a thing he does that almost nobody clocks, because it isn’t a save. It’s the absence of needing one. He’salready where the puck is going, depth set before the shooter finishes choosing. The shot arrives and finds him there. It looks boring. Boring is the hardest work a goalie does. This is film study. This is my job. I do it from the end of the bench with my gloves off and my hands flat on the pads while the building wills the puck past him.
Their twenty-two carries it on his off wing in the second. Cuts to the middle exactly as the tape said. Lundy is already deep, already square. The puck meets his glove and dies in the corner. The barn groans, that specific home-rink sound of a crowd that expected a goal and got my goalie instead.
My hands have stopped.
I notice it the way I noticed the bag. Thumb to each finger and back. They were running the pattern and now they’re still on the pads and the count is nowhere. I didn’t tell them to quit. The read was right. The save was clean. The puck is in the corner. Somewhere in the middle of that, the pattern let go of me. I shelve it. Good positioning, good glove, the save you build a series on. The hands can do what they want. There’s nothing in the stopping that asks for a name.
Lundy taps both posts, glove then blocker, Gertie then Quessa. Resets his depth. The play comes back the other way. I keep track of him. Nobody on this bench knows how much I keep track of. Down the bench Marchetti is screaming at officials who can’t hear him over their own crowd. Davis is hammering the boards. The noise wants us dead. I sit at the end where no elbow finds me, and I watch my goalie hold his net in a building that paid to see him fail. After a while, the count finds my fingers again on its own. Slow and even. The idle hum of a brain with nowhere it needs to be tonight except here, doing this, for as long as they let me stay.
Chapter 2: Lundy
Hotel room, Tampa, the blackout curtain doing its job badly, so there's a blade of gray laid across the carpet. I'm on the floor with my back against the bed and the playlist going low, the one with the soft beat under everything. Twenty-two minutes that look like nothing from the outside and cost more than anyone watching would guess. Nobody's watching. That's most of the point of doing it on a hotel floor at six in the morning. People look at a big settled guy and figure the settled came free with the size. It didn't. It's a job I clock into before the actual job, every morning, because the version of me that skips it's a stranger by noon. Not a calm one. The version of me that comes apart is a version they replace. Seattle taught me exactly how quiet that sounds.
Twenty-two minutes. I don't know why twenty-two. I played lights out one night years ago after sitting still for exactly that long. I've never had the nerve to try twenty-one or twenty-three. It worked for me then, and it worked for me during game 1 of the series.
After breakfast and the team meeting, we get to the rink for practice. The visiting room two levels under the bowl is cold enough to hang meat in. Half the team is being loud about the cold, because this team handles discomfort by narrating it until it's funny. One of the Tampa staff props the door open on her way out, red hair, nice shoulders, and I register it the way I register the exit sign above her head: noted, held, already gone.
"It's a meat locker," Marchetti says. "They put us in a meat locker. This is a tactic even for practice."
"It's a thermostat," Berger says. "Six-two on the thermostat. I checked."
