Page 141 of Puck You Both

SATURDAY, THE MILWAUKEE visitors' space is filled with a looseness we haven't earned yet, and Becker gets up on a bench to fix that.

"Gentlemen." He waits for quiet. "Tonight we face a desperate team, a hostile terrain, and the second best goalie in this division, right after the one wearing our laundry. Tonight, we destroy Wall's boyfriends. With love." He raises a fist. "And also goals."

The team answers with applause. Kane pulls him off the bench mid-encore.

At the far stall, Washington tapes his stick in his own bubble of quiet, last regular-season game of a long career. When he catches me looking he just tips his head at the tunnel. Time to work.

I spend the warmup holding my crease and not looking down the ice. It takes actual effort. Down at the far end there's a man I sleep beside, stretching against his post, and between us, at center, a smaller man in the colors that aren’t mine, who belongs to both of us, skating his loops too fast. The stands are already at playoff volume. The cameras want a story tonight.

The story is the game. They’re not getting anything else.

***

THE GAME IS the best one I've ever played, and I'd erase the memory of it if I could.

It goes scoreless for two periods, and not the boring kind of scoreless. Their forwards keep coming with the season on their sticks. My reads arrive early and my rebounds land where I put them. At the other end, every time we generate something, Patrick erases it with that flat, bored affect that used to keep me up at night for one set of reasons and now keeps me up for another.

He robs Ace with his glove in the second and the Milwaukee crowd chants his first name in unison.

Theo plays like his hair is on fire. He's everywhere, finishing hits, howling at his bench, dragging his line up the ice shift after shift, and every time he gets pulled off, he takes it personally. Twice he gets a puck with the whole game open in front of him, and twice I take it away from him.

The second one is both tragic and magnificent. He's alone at the back door with an empty net's worth of daylight and I get across anyway, without any right to. The puck smacks leather, and the whistle comes. He skates around my crease slow, with his mouth going and no sound in it, just shapes, aimed up at my mask.

LATER, his mouth says.

PROMISE? mine says back.

Every lip-reader on the internet is going to feast. Let them.

Then the puck drops and I go back to taking food off my family's table.

Every save is personal. I stop pretending otherwise somewhere inside the third. The air gets tighter and the Vipers get better and Patrick, at the far end, is playing the game of his life too, I can tell from here, from how small his whole net looks. It changes nothing about what I'm here to do. The horn ends regulation at nothing-nothing, and both teams skate to their rooms amidst a sound I've never heard fans make, hope and dread in the same register.

Overtime is four minutes old when it ends.

It ends at the far end, where I can only watch. A broken play, three skaters converging, a shot I lose in the bodies. Then, the light behind Patrick is on and the score is one to nothing and the loudest building in the league goes silent all at once, roof to ice.

My guys pour over the boards past me, gloves raining, piling into the far corner. I stay in my crease.

Patrick hasn't moved either. He's on his knees now, mask tipped back, looking up into the lights, and the season I just ended is sitting on him, in front of thousands of people, and the shutout, the one that finally puts my ledger ahead for the season, tastes like ash.

I skate to the pile because my team won and they get all of me too. Becker's screaming something joyful into my ear. Over his shoulder, my eyes search the Vipers bench, and find Theo on it, head down, towel over his neck. He doesn't look up.

***

THE HANDSHAKE LINE forms at center, and tonight it's aimed at me.

The Vipers go through it classy and gutted. Lindqvist shakes my hand once, all business, and moves on.

Theo hits me mid-line at full speed, helmet first, no handshake at all, both arms around my ribs in front of every camera in Wisconsin. The officials will need to find a way to let this go. He doesn't say a word into my chest, his gloves shaking against my back. And then he's gone down the line and I have to keep standing.

Patrick is last.

We meet at center ice, two creases' worth of history between us and none of it useful now. His face is doing what it does for cameras. His eyes aren't. He takes my hand, and his grip is private. He leans in the regulation distance and gives it to me, quiet and even, "Best save I've ever seen in person."

My face goes. I feel it go, in front of the cameras, the broadcast, the lip-readers, all of it. Whatever it shows them, it's never been public before, and I let it stay out for the full second he holds my hand.

"I know," I manage.