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The red light goes on.

I don't remember the next part very well.

I know I dropped my stick. I know I dropped my gloves. I know I did the slide. The whole length of the zone, on my knees, with my arms in the air, and I didn't stop at the boards. I hit them so hard my helmet cracked against the glass, and I was screaming, and I couldn't hear myself, and I couldn't hear anything.

Then they were on me. All of them. Sorel first. Then Brandt, screaming something that might have been my name. Webb, crying already. Kowal, who landed on top of the pile like a sack of cement and didn't say a word, just held on.

Then somebody's pulling on my jersey from outside the pile, and it's Adeyemi, yelling, "Rémy! Rémy! Look!"

I get my head out from under Kowal's arm, which weighs as much as a small car.

The benches are empty. The whole team's on the ice. The trainers are on the ice. The coaches. Moretti's on the ice in his suit and dress shoes, skidding across the blue line with his arms out like a man on a frozen pond.

Behind them, at the mouth of the tunnel, there's a gate open in the boards.

He's coming through it.

He's on his crutches. In his suit, the dark gray one with the vest, the one he wore the day of the deposition. His leg's straight out in front of him in the black brace. Dana's on one side of him, and Gus is on the other, and they're holding his arms, and he's not supposed to be out here, he's absolutely not supposed to be out here, Anand's going to kill him.

He's on the ice anyway. On crutches. On the ice.

The crutches slip. Gus grabs him. He keeps coming.

I get up. I get out of the pile. My legs don't work right. I skate toward him, and I don't know if I'm skating or falling, and the confetti's starting to come down now from somewhere up in the rafters, red and white and gold, huge slow flakes of it, landing on the ice and on my shoulders and in my hair.

I stop in front of him.

He's crying. So am I.

Dana lets go of his arm. So does Gus. He's standing on his own now, on one leg and two crutches, in the middle of the ice, in the middle of all of it. The cameras are coming. I can see them out of the corner of my eye, the broadcast guys with the big rigs on their shoulders, skating in from both sides. The photographers along the glass. Nineteen thousand people. Two countries.

Everybody's watching.

"You're not supposed to be out here," I say. My voice is gone. It comes out in pieces.

"I know."

"Anand said not one ounce."

"I know." He's looking at me like I'm the only thing on the ice. "You said you wanted me out here. If we won."

"I did."

"We won," he says.

"We won."

"Rule one," Owen says.

I don't say anything. I can't.

He lets go of one crutch. He just lets it go. It falls on the ice with a clatter, and Dana makes a sound like she's been shot, and he doesn't care. He puts his free hand on the side of my face. His thumb's cold from the rink, and it's shaking.

There, at center ice, in front of every camera in the building, in front of Varga still sitting on the ice by the boards and my mother up in section 112 and nineteen thousand people and the whole country watching on TV, Owen Hale pulls me in and kisses me.

It isn't clumsy. It isn't in a doorway. It isn't in a hallway at midnight, or a closet in the back of Gus's shop, or a lake house two miles from anybody.

It's here. In the middle of everything.