"I don't need it. I want it. Give me the rest of what you've got."
Something settles in his face that hasn't been settled in nine days. "Their D changes late when they're tired. Both pairs. Around the twelve-minute mark of every period."
"You told me that nine days ago in a hallway with a brace on your leg."
"I'm telling you again. It lands different today."
"It does."
"One more. Their bottom-six tries to draw you out on the wraparound. They want you cheating to the post. Don't bite. Let the post do its job."
"Quessa can handle a wraparound."
"Quessa's been handling wraparounds all series. I just like saying her name in a sentence where it sounds like a compliment."
Bodie sticks his head in on his way past, looks at me a second too long.
"You good?"
"I'm good."
"You look different tonight. Looser."
"I'm good, Bodie."
"Then go force me a Game 7."
In the tunnel Davis falls in beside me, gloves tucked under one arm, and doesn't say anything for the length of the concrete walkway. This isn't unusual. Davis doesn't waste words before a game. What's unusual is that he adjusts his stride to mine instead of the other way around. The whole team has been adjusting around me for a month. The careful choreography of twenty-two men pretending they aren't working around the goalie's schedule.
"We're going to get you clean looks tonight," he says, just before the light hits. "Box them out early. Keep the garbage out of your paint."
It is not accommodation. It is a captain telling his goalie he has a defense. I have spent a month noticing the difference between people managing me and people relying on me. This is the second one.
"Appreciate it."
"Don't appreciate it. Just stop the puck." He taps my pad with his stick on the way out. How he taps every goalie. Nothing special. Nothing careful. The nothing-special is the whole point.
I go out for Game 6 and for the first time in my life I take up all the room there is.
That is the thing nobody warned me about freedom. It would feel like getting bigger. Every other game I have played, the crease was the one place my brain was allowed to be the size it actually is, and the rest of me spent the night trying to cost the team nothing. To need no accommodation. To take up the least space a goalie can take up and still be standing in the blue paint. Tonight there is no least space. There is just the puck and me. All of it pointed in one direction. I do not flinch when three of them crash my crease. I do not shrink when their best player winds up from the top. I am not trying to be small enough to survive thenight. I am trying to win it. The cataloguing brain and the still hands and the body that knows where the puck is going before the shooter does. All of it aimed at the only thing in the world that has ever been simple.
The first period they come hard. How Karl's teams come hard. I let them, because letting them come is different from bracing for them. There's a save in the first that I'd not have made in October. A cross-ice one-timer, their winger teeing it up off a seam. The old me would have committed early, would have lunged at the threat as you lunge when you're trying to prove you belong, when every save has to be big enough to justify the space you're using. I don't lunge. I sit in the middle of my net and let the geometry come to me. The puck hits me square in the chest because I was already there. No drama. No dive. Just a man standing exactly where he was entitled to stand. The crowd doesn't even gasp. It's the best save I've made all playoffs and it looks like nothing. Looking like nothing used to be the whole point. Tonight it isn't the point at all. It's just true.
In the second they get a power play and their goalie-cheat doesn't save them because we kill it clean. Davis and Marchetti box out the shooting lanes before the puck can get through. The kind of defense that doesn't show up on a stat sheet but shows up in the shooter's eyes when he realizes the lane he wanted closed thirty seconds ago.
At the twelve-minute mark both their D-pairs are gassed exactly the way Lundy said on a stool with his leg out straight. Marchetti reads the tired backcheck before anyone else in the building does. He cuts across the blue line with his head up and finds the seam their exhausted defenseman left open. He buries it. Not a beautiful goal. A smart one. The kind Lundy would have scored if Lundy still had two working legs, and the building comes up out of its seats as a building does when it remembers it's allowed to want something.
I feel them lean on me after that. The whole team putting its weight on the one position it spent a month afraid of. The weight does not crush me. It holds me up. I did not know it could do that. I did not know that being leaned on and being managed were two completely different things until the difference was the only thing holding me upright in the crease.
The third is them throwing everything and me giving nothing. They try the wraparound and I let Quessa do her job. The puck dies against her. They pull their goalie and put six skaters in my end and the puck is a rumor in a forest of sticks. I don't need to see it. I feel where it has to be the way I've always felt it. Tonight there's no part of me arguing that I don't deserve to be the one who feels it. I cover it. The whistle goes. We're ahead. There's a minute left. Then there isn't. The horn goes. The building doesn't sit down.
"Three-three," Berger is yelling, hanging off my cage. "You hear me? Three-three. We get a Game 7."
"It means we have to win one more game."
"It means we're alive. Say it. Say we're alive."
"We're alive, Berger."
