Page 25 of Thin Ice

We entered through the players' entrance and left the heat outside. At ice level, the league had built a small city: pipe-and-drape backdrops, cable runs taped to the concrete in long silver spines, and under all of it the cold coming up through the concrete.

Jamie sat at a table two over from mine, back straight, the same tell he had when he was holding a full house. "I'm just trying to soak it all in and help the team any way I can," he explained to a national writer. He'd said it four times already and would say it forty more and mean it every time.

Wes was down at the far end handling the big-picture questions—what this run meant to the city and what it would mean to finish it. "This city's earned this. They've been waiting a long time," he said as I passed. "We're not doing it for us. We're doing it for the people who've waited forty years for it."

A woman from the front office found me before they turned my microphone on. "Game One," she said, low, beside the podium. "Moment of silence, his number on a patch. Eileen will be at the glass for it, and she asked—"

"Yes."

"—if you'd be the one to walk her down."

"Yes," I said again. "Tell her I'll come get her from the suite."

She pressed my arm and went off to manage something else.

Then the mics went on.

"Nolan, how's the group feeling coming in?"

"Feeling good. We've got work left, but we like where we're at."

The next one. "Forty years this city's waited. Do you feel that?"

"You try not to. You focus on tomorrow's first shift. The rest takes care of itself."

"Is this the best team you've played on?"

I smiled. "Ask me in two weeks."

They nodded at every comment as if it were meaningful.

A columnist I'd known for three years got his turn near the end. He was a local guy who quoted equipment managers in his column.

"Fourteen seasons, and I can't remember you missing ten games. What do you tell the young guys about playing through it?"

I gave him the answer I'd been giving since I was twelve.

"Pain's part of the job," I said. "Your body's going to talk, but you get to decide what's worth hearing. You play the game in front of you."

It came out smooth as ever.

The next question was from a writer I didn't know. He was younger, glancing at his phone.

"You came up with that Carolina organization when they were rebuilding. Any lessons from those years you're drawing on now?"

"That was a long time ago," I said. "Good people down there. You learn the most from the losing years, and we did a lot of losing." A couple of laughs from the gathered crowd. "Mostly it taught me to keep my head down and work."

The moderator called time. I picked up my water bottle and headed out.

They cut us all loose a little after one. I caught myself checking the edges of the room. Ten days ago I'd have walked out of a place like this without looking at anything but the clock. I found Elias leaning against a pillar past the last camera platform. My shoulders dropped a notch.

"Maddie's got new pads," Brick said.

He was fifteen feet away, with a protein bar in one hand. "Thirty-four inches. Jen wants to know if you're coming to dinner—"

He stopped. He looked from me to the pillar and back.

Brick said nothing. He bit the protein bar and picked the sentence back up where he'd dropped it.