Maya is up there too. Press section. Credential around her neck. Laptop open. I found her the moment I stepped onto the ice, the dark hair, the posture, the way she sits forward with her elbows on the counter and her eyes tracking warmups without blinking.
Tonight, she’s writing about us. The Dante Voss-Cole Maddox pairing. The feature she has been building all season. She’ll write what she sees from sixty feet above the ice. The passing lanes. The timing. The way we find each other in traffic.
She will put the game on the page. The lanes, the timing, the numbers.
Beneath the hockey, there are six years of closed doors. Cole’s mouth against mine in the dark. My fingers in her hair when the lights stay on and nobody in the room looks away.
Addison pulls us in at the bench.
“You’ve played your whole lives to get to this ice.” His voice cuts through the noise. “This is the ice. This is the game. Leave everything on it.”
Adrian’s stick hits the boards. The team breaks.
The puck drops.
First period is a war. Wisconsin comes out physical, their forecheck suffocating, two men deep on every puck, their defensemen pinching into the neutral zone. Across the lineup, they are bigger than us. Their center outweighs Adrian by twenty pounds.
Adrian lines up anyway.
He wins the first faceoff clean and sends it back to the point, and the possession is ours.
Cole and I run the cycle. The puck goes low behind the net. I carry it along the half-wall, and two bodies converge: their winger, their defenseman, the lane closing in front of me. I protect the puck with my body, shoulder into the boards, and I wait.
One second.
Two.
Cole cuts through the seam. The lane opens for a fraction of a beat, and that is enough because I know where he is. The pass leaves my stick before the lane fully opens. It arrives on his tape at the exact moment he arrives at the spot.
He fires. The shot is hard, low, aimed at the far post. The goalie kicks out his pad. The rebound pops loose. I am already there, because when Cole shoots low to the far post, the rebound comes back to the slot, and I have been picking up his rebounds since we were seventeen.
I bury it.
Top of the net.
The horn sounds, and the building shakes.
Cole’s glove hits my chest. His helmet knocks against mine. Through the cage, his eyes are bright, wild, his mouth moving, but I can’t hear what he says because sixteen thousand people are on their feet.
I grab the back of his helmet and pull him closer until our cages knock together.
“Hell of a read,” he shouts.
“Hell of a shot,” I shout back.
The team piles in. Gio’s arm locks across my shoulders. Adrian’s fist pounds my back.
I glance up.
Section 114.
Maya is on her feet with one hand pressed flat against the glass rail of the press section. Her eyes are on us. On the two of us. On Cole’s glove still planted in the center of my chest.
Her eyes stay on Cole’s glove for one beat too long.
The next shift grinds into the boards. Wisconsin ties it midway through the second, a power-play goal, a screened shot Declan never sees. The building goes quiet for three seconds and then gets louder, the crowd pushing back against the silence.
Third period. Tied. The ice is heavy now, forty minutes of hockey burning through my legs, my lungs working harder than they should. Every stride costs double. Every shift feels shorter.
