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Moretti stands in the middle of the room and holds up one hand, and the noise dies down.

"Nine more," he says. "Then the real season."

He doesn't say anything else. Everybody cheers anyway.

I get my skates off. I stand up to go to the showers, and my knee locks again, halfway through the motion. I catch myself on the edge of the stall. It's quick. Nobody sees.

Dana sees.

She's across the room, packing ice bags into the cooler, and she stops with one bag in her hand and looks at me. She doesn't say anything. She doesn't have to.

"Tomorrow," she says, when I come out of the shower. She's waiting by my stall with her arms crossed. "Eight a.m. MRI. I already booked it."

"Dana—"

"You said after the road trip, Owen. That was October. You said after Christmas. You said after the break. You said after we clinched." She taps her watch. "We clinched. Eight a.m. I'm driving you, so don't even think about it."

The MRI machine sounds like somebody hitting a trash can with a hammer, over and over, for forty minutes.

Then I sit in a small office with a window that looks at a parking lot and wait for Dr. Anand. He's been our team doctor for nine years. He did Webb's shoulder. He did the needle before opening night. He comes in with a tablet and closes the door behind him and sits down, not behind the desk but in the chair next to mine, and I know from that what he's going to say before he says any of it.

"It's bad, Owen," he says.

He turns the tablet so I can see. It's a gray picture of the inside of my knee. It doesn't look like anything to me. He points with the end of a pen.

"This is your meniscus. The cushion. See this line here? That's a tear. It's a big one. That's what's locking. There's a piece that's flipping into the joint and catching." He moves the pen. "This is cartilage, what's left of it. There isn't much. Here and here, it's bone on bone."

"Okay."

"It's not okay." He puts the tablet down on his knee. "If you have surgery now, we clean up the tear, we look at what else we can do for the cartilage, you're out eight to twelve weeks. Your season's over."

"If I don't?"

"If you don't, you keep playing on it, and every game, every hit, every time you stop hard, that piece of meniscus is grinding on what's left of your cartilage. It could hold for a month. It could go on the next shift." He looks at me. "When it goes, it goes all the way. You're not looking at a cleanup anymore. You're looking at a total knee replacement. At thirty-five. You'd be walking with a cane before you're forty."

The room's quiet. Outside the window, somebody in the parking lot can't find their car. They keep pressing the button on their key fob and the horn keeps honking, somewhere out of sight.

"The playoffs start in three weeks," I say.

"I know when the playoffs start."

"It's my last season."

"I know that too." He sighs. "Owen, I'm not going to tell you what to do. It's your knee. It's your body. You're an adult. But as your doctor, my recommendation is you shut it down. Get the surgery. Walk into your retirement on two good legs."

"My recommendation," Dana says from the doorway, where I didn't know she was standing, "is you listen to him."

I look at the gray picture on the tablet. The line through the meniscus. The places where there's nothing left.

"Can you manage it?" I ask. "Injections. Drain it before games. Whatever you did before opening night. Can you get me through?"

Anand doesn't answer right away.

"I can try," he says finally. "I can't promise anything."

"Then try."

"Owen—" Dana says.