"Louder."
"We're alive."
"You shut the door. You know that? You shut the door on a Game 6, at home, with the season on it. The quiet guy. Two weeks ago we were burying this team and now we're going to a Game 7."
"It's one more game."
"It's the last game. The whole thing, one game, and we earned the right to play it. Nobody handed us that. You earned it. Let the building say thank you."
Davis finds me in the handshake line and puts his forehead against my cage, the way he does with Lundy, the way I've watched him do with Lundy for two seasons and never expectedto be on the receiving end of. "One more," he says. "One more and we get to keep playing."
Marchetti taps my pads on his way past. Thompson gives me the nod, the one that means he clocked the number and the win and is holding both under the same heading. Bodie catches my eye from across the ice and just points at me. Says nothing. It's the loudest thing Bodie has ever said.
The room after isn't the dread lifting as it lifted in Game 5, the desperate gasp of a team that was dead and got one more breath. It's something else. Something I haven't heard this team make all year. The sound of a group of people who have stopped asking whether they're allowed to want the whole thing. They want it. Out loud now. And Lundy crosses to my stall on the crutches. Slow. The braced leg held off the floor. He doesn't say anything about the game. The game isn't the thing. The game was never the thing.
"Seven across was starboard," he says.
"I told you it was starboard. In the car. Before you told me it wasn't nautical."
"I know what I told you. I'm telling you now you were right. It was nautical." He lowers himself onto the bench beside me, careful, the leg straight, his shoulder coming to rest against mine in a room full of people who could all turn around and see it and none of whom would be surprised. "It's always nautical on Wednesdays."
"It's not, actually."
"It's true enough."
?
Chapter 31: Soucy
“Seven across,” I say, because it’s Game 7 and the only way I know to make Game 7 the same size as every other day is to do the things I do on every other day.
“It’s a Sunday,” Lundy says, from the stool, the braced leg out straight. “Sundays don’t have a theme.”
“Everything has a theme if you look hard enough.”
“That’s the least true thing you’ve ever said. Seven across is ‘keystone.’”
“You didn’t even let me try.”
“It’s Game 7. I’m not letting anything take forty-five seconds today.”
He sets the pen down. He looks at me for a while, and I let him, because I know what is coming. There is no version of the day where he does not say it.
“I can’t do anything for you out there tonight,” he says.
“I know.”
“I’m going to sit on that stool and watch my own father try to take this from you and I won’t be able to lift a finger.”
“You being unable to help isn’t the same as you being no help. You taught me that.”
“...yeah.”
“Sit on your stool. Watch. That was always enough. It’s still enough.”
Thompson sets the coffee by my left hand, far from the edge.
“Forty-five?”
