Page 119 of Cherry Picking

I take two shifts against their top line and spend most of them below the hash marks, doing the ugly, grinding work Bellan asked for.

Duval bails us out twice. The second one is a desperate scramble at the top of the crease with three bodies buried on him, and it gets the whole building screaming. I feel the roar in the back of my teeth.

We go into the first intermission scoreless. The update on the board says New York is up by one. So far, the math is holding.

Fozzy is the one who finally breaks the seal in the second.

He has no business being in that tight, but the puck squirts loose off a mess of sticks, and he’s the only one who reads the bounce. He jams it under the pad before the goalie can seal the post, and our bench empties over the boards. One to nothing.

Washington answers before the period ends. Ottawa ties it up in New York, which means they’ve already got a point banked whatever happens next. The math evaporates in real time, and now it’s two games happening at once—ours and one five hundred miles away—and nobody in this building has enough eyes to watch both.

The third period takes a decade.

Neither team wants to be the one who blinks, so the game stays tight and mean. I chase pucks into corners I shouldn’t be in because that’s the only version of me worth the ice time tonight. My legs are gone by the ten-minute mark, but I keep moving. Bellan double-shifts me, and I don’t say a word.

With six minutes left, Washington gets a rush the other way—a two-on-one with our defenseman caught pinching. I come across from the far side, and I get my stick down flat in the lane before the trailer can one-time it into the open side. The puck skids harmlessly into the corner.

Our whole bench is standing. Sam raps his stick against my pads on his way past, once, hard enough to sting, which from him is a parade.

I skate to the bench with my lungs on fire.

Regulation ends in a tie. New York and Ottawa are headed to overtime, too.

We go to three-on-three.

Overtime is pure chaos once the safety rails are removed. All that open ice means the first team to make a mistake loses everything. Bellan taps me and Augie for the opening shift. We’re gassed, but the whole season is sitting in the next few minutes, so being tired doesn’t matter.

Fifty seconds in, I strip a puck at our own blue line, and suddenly, it’s a two-on-one going the other way—me and Augie and one defenseman trying to play the middle.

If I shoot and miss, that’s the mistake that ends a season.

I look at the tender’s eyes and see him cheating toward me, squaring up for the shot he thinks I’m taking, and I slide the puck across the grain instead. Augie doesn’t even have to break stride. He buries it into a wide-open net, the horn wails, and the building comes apart at the seams.

Then everyone is on the ice.

I get two seconds of Augie crushing the air out of my lungs before the rest of the bench arrives, a storm of gloves and sticks. Somebody knocks my helmet off. Duval skates the length of the ice with his mask up and his arms already in the air.

It takes a minute for anyone to actually look at the scoreboard.

When we finally do, the jumbotron cuts to the final from New York, and it shows Ottawa lost in the shootout. It’s one point instead of two, and one point isn’t enough. The noise in here doubles. We’re in. The ice is a mess of grown men who’ve been grinding since October and just got the one thing they were promised.

The handshake line forms and dissolves in a blur of sweaty gloves. The Washington guys are as gracious as they can be about the exit. I tap palms down the line without registering a single face.

Then my gaze drifts back toward the glass in the family section.

The vacant seats have been filled.

I find Evie’s face in the crowd. She’s here, leaning hard against the railing at the top of the boards with both hands fisted on it, looking right at me. It takes me a second to understand what I’m seeing, which is why I nearly miss the man standing next to her.

My father is on his feet.

He’s standing upright in the middle of nineteen thousand people, his cane hooked uselessly over his forearm, his knuckles white as he grips the rail to hold himself steady.

He couldn’t have made this trip alone. He couldn’t have made it at all without someone planning the logistics down to the hour, mapping out his meds and wheeling him through that shitty terminal.

Evie did all of that. For me. For my dad.

And he’s not even trying to hold it together, crying openly up there behind the glass. He has one fist raised at me like I’m nine years old again and just scored my first goal in a desert rink.