Page 36 of Puck You Both

"I visualized it. I did the work." He points his stick at my glove like it owes him money. "Forty saves, Wall. You've blinked twice in an hour. What the fuck is wrong with you?"

Three weeks of this. Ever since Milwaukee, my save percentage has climbed to a number the analytics people are describing as unsustainable.

It is sustainable. What’s sustaining it lives in Milwaukee and I've been ignoring both of its phone numbers.

Not thinking about that.

Ace comes in on a rush and tries to go far side. My blocker's already there. He peels away shaking his head.

"He's doing it again," Groover announces to the bench. "The thing where he knows."

I always know, though. Reading shooters is the job. The difference lately is that reading shooters is also the only room in my head with the lights on, so I've moved in, full time.

Jinx arrives at my post the way he arrives everywhere: sideways, like the ice might be listening. "Walk me through your morning," he demands.

"No."

"Wall." His voice drops. "I need to know what, so I can reproduce it."

Petrov saves me by shooting. I catch it without looking, which is a mistake, because Jinx makes a sound like a man witnessing scripture. "What did you eat," he says. "Exactly."

"Chicken and rice."

"What type of rice? We need specifics."

I give him a brand name I make up on the spot, and from that moment forward my meal prep is a religious site. He forbids anyone from touching my gear. He forbids me from washing my chest protector, which I will be ignoring for the good of the room. When Hammer leans on my crossbar during a water break, Jinx physically escorts him away from it.

Coach Martin watches all of it from the bench with his whistle in his mouth, looking uncharacteristically pleased, the picture of a man whose goaltender is stopping everything and whose policy on miracles is, don't audit them. At the end of the last drill he skates over, taps my pads once.

"Whatever you're doing," he says, "keep doing it."

Absolutely not.

What I'm doing has a shelf life, an area code, and two unanswered texts, and if I keep doing it much longer I'm going to have to look up what it's called, and the last time I tried that, incognito mode was involved.

"Sure, Coach," I say.

He skates off happy. One of us should be.

The whistle goes for center ice, and we gather around Washington the way we've gathered around Washington for eight years: expecting systems talk, getting ready to tune out the parts about backchecking. He waits until the last straggler coasts in. Then he doesn't talk about backchecking.

"Six-thirty. My place. Bring your people."

That's it. That's the speech.

A beat of silence while a dozen professional athletes process the absence of hockey content, and then everyone talks at once.

Becker’s head emerges from under Kane’s arm. “Why?”

“Because I’m inviting you.”

“That explains the mechanism, not the motive.”

"Six-thirty," Washington says, already turning, and this is the part I catch. Gone before anyone can get a read on his face.

He's protecting something. Something real, with weight to it, and a cold little draft comes in under my chest protector and sits there.

"What is dress code?" Petrov calls after him.