Page 80 of Thin Ice

"I'm still here."

"Okay then." He put the skate on. "Twenty minutes. We win this thing, and then you go find out what's going on. Focus out there. You're no good to him or the rest of us at half-speed." He knocked his shoulder into mine once. "Forty years. I can taste it."

Down the bench, Jamie was talking to Misha with his hands, demonstrating a play, and Misha watched patiently. The kid's hands were steady. He was dialed in.

The buzzer went. Misha stood, touched one bear on the head with a gloved finger, and led us down the tunnel.

The third period of a tied Game Seven is the longest hour in hockey, and I played it split down the middle.

As the period unfolded, nobody came with more news about Elias. I knew Petey would return if everything went south.

We won it at 9:14 of the third.

It started as nothing, a puck rolling up the wall on our power play that Wes flattened at the line. I skated to the front of the net and stood there. Their defenseman checked into my strapped ribs like he'd seen an x-ray and knew precisely where to hit. I planted my skates and took it. Wes walked two feet left, and I tied up their defenseman's stick so he couldn't clear the lane.

I never saw the puck. I heard it. The riverboat whistle blew and twenty thousand people yelled at once. Wes climbed on my back, yelling something I never made out.

Two-one. We had ten and a half minutes to work off the clock, but that was the easier job.

Boston came in waves. Misha stood his ground and refused to let anything pass. With 1:54 left, their goalie sprinted for the bench, and Coach called me in for the last shift assignment of my career.

I won the face-off in our zone. They cycled, and I blocked a point shot with my good leg.

The puck squirted loose with thirty seconds left, and Jamie chipped it the length of the ice. Twenty thousand people counted it down—ten, nine—and the horn cut them off at zero.

Then the riverboat whistle.

Not three blasts. It came on long and low and didn't stop, the deep-water sound the building had been taught to wait for, and it ran past the point where a win would have let it go. The last time it had run like this, the men whose banners hung in the rafters were young. Some of them were in the building for a new Cup victory.

The team piled on Misha, gloves and sticks raining down. Jamie went airborne. Brick skated circles with his arms out, and under all of it the whistle held, and held.

I turned away from the pile. Confetti rained down on the ice. My heart pounded, and the whistle was still going.

Elias came up the north tunnel.

He was walking under his own power. Doyle had a man on either side, neither of them touching him. He had a forearm wrapped in gauze, with blood dried at the knuckles. He scanned the arena, and when he found me, he jogged in my direction.

Every lens in North America was pointed at that ice, and I knew they wouldn't stay on the expected pile of hockey players. They would focus on the alternate captain of the Stanley Cup champions skating past his team and past the Cup itself, coming out on a cart. They would show me dropping my gloves and my stick before I wrapped a battered man in my arms, holding him to my chest.

They could have it. I'd spent fourteen years trying to make sure my story got told my way. This story told itself.

"You're late," Elias said. "I handled it."

"You did not."

"No." He placed his good hand on the back of my neck. "Somebody sent them to the ice plant. He'd said that's where they'd hold me." The hand tightened. "Nolan, you told them."

"I was on the bench."

"You answered when they asked."

He didn't say anything else, and neither did I.

The team carried the Cup over to me a minute later. Wes handed it over, and I carried it in one slow lap around the ice. I found Eileen Danaher standing behind the glass. She had both hands pressed flat against it. I raised the Cup to her, and the old veterans from 1986 stood up around her one at a time.

***

Three nights later, Misha hosted the poker game. He'd promised it during the rest gap. He wrote his promises in concrete.