go back to sleep Mackie
Mackie
can’t
too busy being in love with a goalie who has a hockey game tonight
it’s very distracting
The facility is quiet with only the lights inBarrett’s office already on. I walk into the locker room, drop into my stall, and close my eyes.
Rodriguez arrives around noon and drops into the stall next to mine.
“You good?” he asks.
“Yeah.”
“Can you tell me about the skate laces?”
“Never.”
“Ride or die, Z.”
“Ride or die.”
The building is literally shaking.
The concrete floor of the tunnel vibrates under my skates as the team lines up for the walk out. Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals on home ice, completing a comeback from 0-3. Twenty thousand people are on their feet, and the roar when we hit the ice is the loudest thing I’ve ever heard.
I skate to my crease, look up at the scoreboard—0-0, 20:00—and scan the family suite. I can’t make out faces from here, but I know she’s there.
Standing in my crease while the anthem washes over me, I realize I’m terrified the exact same way I was the night everything started. But this time I know what the terror feels like, and I know I can play through it.
The teams are about to line up for the opening faceoff. I’m in my crease with my stance set when someone skates up behind me. I turn my head and see Jack. He puts his hand on my shoulder. “Can you stop the puck?” he says.
I stare at him and nod.
“The boys can do everything else. All you need to do is stop the puck.”
He squeezes my shoulder once before skating to center ice. The referee drops the puck and the game begins.
They comeat us in waves and my body answers before my brain does. Glove up on a one-timer I don’t see until it’s past the screen. Pad out on a redirect that changes direction twice before it reaches me. A wrister from the point that catches the edge of my blocker and stings through the padding so hard my fingers go numb for a full shift, but I don’t shake them out. Shaking them out means I felt it, and I can’t afford to feel anything right now.
1-0 them on a power play, midway through the first. I get my blocker on it but the angle is wrong, and the puck catches the inside edge to deflect past me. I hear it hit the back of the net before the horn goes, but the building inhales and comes back twice as loud. This crowd is not going to let a 0-3 comeback die on a single power play goal, and neither am I.
I tap both posts and reset. The goal is already behind me, which means the next shot is the only shot that matters.
Rodriguez ties it three minutes later, 1-1 as the building explodes.
Second period.I skate to my crease and tap both posts before I feel him again. Jack is in the same spot with his hand on my shoulder, repeating his line. “Can you stop the puck? The boys can do the rest. Just stop the puck.”
I make eleven saves in the second, and three of them are saves I won’t remember making until Mackie reminds me later. A two-on-one where I split so wide my groin screams and the puck hits my pad to send me flat on my back. A one-timer throughtraffic where I only know the puck exists because my blocker punches it out of the air before my eyes catch up. A loose puck sitting six inches from the line that I poke-check into the corner. The bench erupts and I don’t react, because reacting means I know how close that was. 1-1 after two.
In the thirdperiod we throw everything at their goalie and he’s good—he’s been good all series, because this is his last season and he’s not going out without a fight. Barrett calls a timeout with eight minutes left. Rodriguez is nodding at the board. Jack is at the front, right next to Barrett, staring at the play with the intensity I’ve seen from him in every big moment for two years.
Five minutes left and Roman takes a tripping penalty. We’re shorthanded and I tell Dex, “I’ve got the back door. You take the one-timer.”
He nods. They move the puck. I track it, reading the rhythm of their power play—pass, pass, look to the one-timer, if it’s not there they go back door. The one-timer’s not there because Dex is in the lane. They go back door, but I’m already sliding across because I trusted the read.
