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I skate to the bench. I sit down hard.

“Fuck,” I say. Under my breath. Not loud enough for the ref, loud enough for Wyatt beside me, who doesn’t say anything back, just claps my shoulder pad once. The wordless Wyatt version of shake it off.

I don’t shake it off. Not right away. I sit on that bench replaying the read — the half-second I was late, the gap I should’ve closed sooner — and the anger sits in my chest like something physical, something I can feel in my jaw and my hands and the way I grip my stick a little too hard on the next shift.

Third period. Everything tightens.

We’re pressing. Hartwell’s sitting back on their lead, playing the trap, clogging the neutral zone so every rush we try dies before it starts. I’m getting frustrated — I can feel it building, the specific heat of a game slipping away from a team that’s better than the scoreboard says — and with six minutes left I take a hit along the boards that’s late. Clearly late.

The ref doesn’t call it.

“That’s fucking late,” I say. To nobody. To the ice. “Ref, that’s late as hell.”

No call.

I skate back to position. I don’t let it become another penalty — I’ve learned that lesson already tonight — but I carry the anger with me into the next shift. It turns into something useful. Two minutes later I strip Delgado clean at our blue line. No penalty. Just a clean stick and better positioning. I carry the puck up ice myself and dish it to Cash streaking down the wing.

Cash buries it top shelf.

2-2.

The building comes apart. I hear it — the specific roar of a home crowd that’s been holding its breath for two periods finally getting to let it out — and somewhere in section four I know Margo’s on her feet, and I don’t look, because we’ve got ninety seconds left and this game isn’t over.

“Let’s go,” I shout, to the bench, to the guys still catching their breath. “We’re not done. Ninety seconds. Let’s fucking go.”

We don’t score again in regulation. We don’t need to. Ninety seconds becomes overtime.

Three-on-three. Open ice, everything faster, every mistake magnified. I’m on the ice for the start of it, matched against Delgado one more time, and I tell myself: not this time. Not the same read. Not the same half-second late.

The building’s gone quiet in the specific way it does during overtime — not silent, but tense, held, like eight hundred people are all holding the same breath at the same time. I can hear my own skates on the ice. I can hear my own breathing inside my helmet.

Delgado tries the same give-and-go he beat me with twice already tonight.

I don’t bite.

I read it before it happens — the shoulder dip, the specific angle of his hips that means he’s about to cut — and I close the gap before he gets there. Stick on the puck. Clean strip. No penalty. I’m already moving up ice with it before Hartwell’s D can recover.

I don’t score goals. That’s not my job and everyone on this team knows it. My job right now is getting the puck to somebody who can finish, and I see Wyatt breaking wide at the top of the circle, and I hit him with a pass that’s a little behind him, a little imperfect, and he has to reach for it, and for one full second I think I’ve just cost us the game with a bad pass in overtime.

Wyatt doesn’t think that. Wyatt’s been quiet and steady this whole game, doing the unglamorous work nobody notices, and he reaches back for the puck, corrals it in one motion, and buries a wrist shot far side before the goalie even gets his glove up.

The building explodes.

I’m on the ice for the celebration, and the whole team piles on Wyatt, and I’m in the middle of it — somebody’s glove hits me in the face, somebody’s screaming directly into my ear, Cash is somewhere underneath the pile shouting something that might be words — and in the noise and the mess of bodies and sticks I look up toward section four.

Margo is there. On her feet. Both hands over her mouth.

Even from here, even through a full sheet of ice and a wall of celebrating hockey players, I can see exactly what her face is doing.

We won. Conference finals. One step from the Frozen Four.

The locker room after is chaos in the good way.

Sticks banging against stalls. Somebody’s music too loud. Cash already narrating the game-winning play to anyone who’ll listen, details getting more heroic with each retelling — by the third version he’s apparently the one who set up the whole sequence, which is not remotely what happened, but nobody’s correcting him tonight. Wyatt sits in his stall getting his shoulder pads pulled off by two guys at once, looking like he’d rather be anywhere else, which is exactly how Wyatt reacts to being the hero of anything.

Coach comes in. Doesn’t say much. Doesn’t need to.

“Good response,” he says, to the room. “Good discipline in the third.” He looks at me specifically. “Good stick on that last strip.”