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A number I don't know, with a Rimouski area code: This is Josée. Rémy gave me your number in March in case of emergency. This is not an emergency. I am just very proud. Tourtière after the game. Win or lose. I already bought the pie.

I sit there on the bench outside the dressing room and read all of them twice. Then I put the phone back in my pocket, face-up, and go in.

The dressing room goes quiet when I come in.

Everybody's in some stage of gear. Half-dressed, taping sticks, sitting in their stalls with their eyes closed. Everybody turns around and looks at me. I know they heard. You can hear everything through that door. They heard the Tribune guy. They heard Varga.

Nobody says anything.

Then Kowal, in his stall, starts banging his stick on the floor. Twice.

Then Brandt. Then Webb. Then everybody. The whole room, sticks on the rubber floor, loud and hard and together, until it sounds like the building's going to fall down.

I stand there on my crutches in the doorway with my eyes stinging.

He's in his stall. Rémy. In the middle of it all, banging his stick with everybody else, with his pink laces on and his hair pushed back and his whole face lit up the way it was on opening night.

He's looking right at me.

Brandt stands up. He's got the C on. He takes it off. Not the jersey. He just puts his hand over it, flat.

"Cap," he says. "You want to say something? Before we go out?"

"It's your team tonight."

"It's been your team for six years," Brandt says. "One more night won't kill me."

The room's quiet again, waiting.

I don't have a speech. I never did. Moretti said once that I'd stand up and say two words and everybody would want to run through a wall. I never knew which two words. I just said whatever came.

I look around the room. At Webb, who drove me here. At Kowal, whose daughter wears the wrong jersey to school. At Sorel. At Brandt with his hand on the C. At Adeyemi and Pratt and all the young guys who came up this year and watched everything happen and didn't say a word.

At him.

"Play proud," I say.

Two words. It's all I've got.

It turns out it's enough.

Anand won't let me on the bench. Injured players stay off the bench. League rules.

So I watch from the mouth of the tunnel, behind the glass at the end of our bench, sitting on a folding chair Gus brought out for me, with my leg up on an upside-down bucket and Dana standing next to me with her arms crossed.

It's the loudest I've ever heard the building. Louder than the clinch. Louder than the conference final. It's so loud the glass in front of me is humming.

Nashville scores first. Varga, of course. Seven minutes in, on a deflection off Brandt's stick. He skates past our bench after and doesn't tap his heart. He doesn't say anything to anybody. He just skates back to center.

We tie it in the second. Sorel, from Rémy. It's a pass across the slot that nobody else in the building saw coming, flat and hard and right onto Sorel's tape, and Sorel buries it, and when he turns around Rémy's already there, already jumping on him.

Up in 112, I can see Josée on her feet. The man next to her in the toque has both arms in the air.

In the second intermission, Moretti comes out of the room and down the tunnel to my chair. He's never done that. He never leaves the room between periods. He stands there beside me with his hands in his pockets, looking out at the empty ice while the Zamboni goes around.

"You were on TV," he says. "The hallway. Both of them. The Tribune guy and Varga."

"I figured."