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"You love it," he says, and grins at me, and in front of every camera in the building I can't do anything about the look on my face.

The room after is chaos. Somebody's got a speaker going. Somebody else has sprayed an entire can of shaving cream on the ceiling fan, and it's flinging foam in slow circles over everybody's heads. Adeyemi's still filming.

Priya comes through the door with the media, and she's got an expression I've never seen on her before, like Christmas came early and brought a headache with it.

"The trophy," she says to me, low, before the cameras get set up. "It's everywhere. It's the number one clip in the country. Rookie defies superstition."

"I told him not to."

"I know. I can read lips. So can everybody else." She sighs. "They're going to ask him about it."

They do. They go straight to him, the whole wall of cameras, and he sits in his stall with his hair wet and his cheeks still red and a towel around his neck.

"Rémy, you touched the conference trophy. You know the superstition. Why'd you do it?"

"Because somebody had to take the bad luck," he says. "Better me than the captain. I'm twenty. I've got time for bad luck. He doesn't."

The reporters laugh. A couple of them look over at me.

"So you were protecting him?"

"I was protecting the team." He grins. "The captain's the team. Everybody knows that."

"Owen, any reaction?"

I'm across the room. I don't want to be part of this. But they're looking at me, and he's looking at me, and so is everyone else.

"He doesn't listen," I say. "He's never listened. I gave him a list of rules in October. He's broken every single one."

"Not every one," Rémy calls across the room.

"Every one."

"I never touched your sticks."

The whole room cracks up, even Moretti, who's standing in the doorway with his arms folded. The reporters are laughing. Priya's shaking her head, but she's smiling. For one minute, in the middle of all that foam and noise, it's just a locker room, and he's just a kid who broke a rule, and I'm just the old man who wrote it.

Nadia catches him on the way to the showers. I see her from across the room, her tablet under one arm, leaning in close, saying something fast. I see his face change. Not much.

Later, in the hallway, I ask him.

"Frostline," he says. "They've seen the trophy clip. They love it. They want the contract signed before the Final. They want to shoot the first commercial the week after, if we win. The rookie who touched the trophy."

"What did you tell her?"

"That my agent will call them." He doesn't look at me. "That I need until after the Final."

"Rémy—"

"After the Final," he says, and I hear my own words coming back at me, and I don't have anything to say.

The other conference final ends two nights later.

We watch it in the players' lounge, the whole team, on the big TV. Pizza boxes everywhere. Moretti in the back with his arms crossed. Game six, Nashville up three games to two against Seattle.

Varga's back from his suspension. He served it in February and hasn't slowed down since. He's having the best playoffs of his life. Nine goals. He scores the empty-netter with a minute left to clinch it, and he skates to the glass and pounds on it with both fists, and the Nashville crowd goes crazy.

Then the camera catches his face, right up close, and he looks straight into it and smiles.