Page 54 of Thin Ice

This one never dropped. Through every whistle, TV timeout, and dead puck, it kept up a flat, sustained roar.

Boston made the minor adjustments everybody makes: a different look on the forecheck early, or sending their big pair out against Wes instead of me, but the spine was the same: 1-3-1 across the neutral zone.

Boston scored at 9:40 of the second. It happened fast. I lost the draw, and they planted a body in front of the crease so Misha couldn't see, and a shot came through their screen, ticking off a stick on the way in.

Nobody blames the goalie for that one. Brick said the deflection was luck, and everyone believed him. I sat there knowing the whole thing started with a face-off I'd have won a year ago.

The goal took the crowd out of the game for the first time. The hush was worse than the nonstop noise.

Wes gave them their voices back with ninety seconds left in the period. It was a broken play, a puck rolling on edge at the blue line that he batted flat through four sets of legs. Their goalie guessed wrong. It cleared his glove by six inches.

The riverboat whistle blew, and I worried the noise would collapse the ceiling. On the bench, Jamie leaned into my shoulder and yelled over it.

"That's my goal. I've been building that since Game Two."

"File a grievance," I said.

For half of the third period, we were the better team, but we couldn't put a puck in the net. We hemmed them in for whole shifts. Jamie missed two masterful shots: one bounced off a post, and the goalie stopped the other with a barely there tip off the end of his glove.

Then the ice tilted.

The winner started with me on the wall, eight minutes remaining. I chased a puck behind the net, and for the first time in the series, they came at me a different way. All year they'd used the same forecheck; now, with the game on the line, they changed it. Their first guy cut off my path along the boards, and the second came in behind him.

I tried to chip the puck out. That kind of clearing pass loads everything through the left hip. It came off my stick at half-speed and died at the top of the circles, right where they wanted it.

After that, we did our best to hang on. They moved the puck around, and we chased it. By the time the shot came, we were too tired to cut it off. Misha stopped the first one. Their center buried the rebound.

Two-one. Six minutes left.

We pushed. Coach shortened the bench, and I doubled up shifts. With 1:50 on the clock, he sent me out for the six-on-five with Misha sprinting for the bench behind me.

Wes had the puck up top. Jamie rotated low. Twenty seconds. A shot came through and I got a piece with my blade, a redirect that beat the goalie clean, but it rang off the outside of the post.

The puck slid the length of the ice into our corner and died. The horn blew.

Two-one. Down three games to two.

Eighteen thousand people went silent at once. What's left when a crowd like that goes quiet is small and terrible: you can hear the other team. Down at the far end, eleven Boston players piled onto each other, laughing. It was a thin, bright sound a road team makes in a building it just killed.

Wes took most of the questions, but they came for me, too. A national reporter found me first.

"Nolan, one loss from the end of the season now. Fourteen years, maybe your best shot at a Cup. You've absorbed more contact than anybody in this series." He held his recorder a little closer. "What do you tell your body to get it to answer the bell for a game like Game Six?"

I reached for something worth saying, and I couldn't find it. I stood there with my mouth open, saying nothing.

"It's June," I said. "Everybody in both rooms has earned their bruises. We'll be ready for the game."

It was fine, a nothing answer, and it'd probably be on TV by the end of the night. Wes glanced up. He knew I was reaching, and it wasn't my usual response.

I found Elias at his pillar past the last camera, where he always was. He caught my eye and tipped his head toward the exit. I joined him. He didn't say anything about the game. He just fell in beside me and walked me to the car.

Brick caught us in the players' lot.

He was parked two rows over, bag already in the truck bed, and he crossed the concrete with his tie stuffed in his jacket pocket. Around us, the lot was emptying in silence, engines starting one at a time, nobody gunning anything.

"Maddie texted me between periods," he said. "During the game, Nolan."

"What'd she say?"