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At the door, Priya reaches past me and opens it.

"That was perfect," she says under her breath.

"My hands are shaking."

"I know," she says. "Nobody else could tell."

Nashville's dressing room is at the other end of the same corridor. You can't get there from the bus without walking past ours.

They come through twenty minutes later, in their suits, in a line, with their bags on their shoulders. Some of them look at me, sitting on the bench outside our door with my leg out straight in front of me. Most of them don't.

Varga does.

He stops. The guy behind him almost walks into him. He looks at my brace, and my crutches, and my face, and he smiles.

"Old man," he says. "Heard you had a press conference."

The cameras are still here. Some of them. A few reporters hanging around by the wall, waiting for pregame. One of them lifts a phone. I see it out of the corner of my eye.

I let him.

"I did," I say.

"Came to watch your boyfriend lose?"

Everybody in the hallway goes still. The Nashville guys behind Varga. The reporters by the wall. Gus, who's come out of the equipment room with a stack of towels and stopped dead in the doorway.

I look at Varga. At his shaved lip and his nice suit and his eyes, which are watching me carefully, the same way Rémy said they watched him in game six. Like a dog you're not sure is going to bite.

For seventeen years I'd have said nothing. I'd have looked at the floor. I'd have let it roll off, the way I let everything roll off, and I'd have told myself it didn't matter, and gone into the room, and closed the door.

"I came to watch him play," I say. "You should watch him too, Cody. You've been watching him since he was sixteen. You've been watching him so hard you haven't noticed anything else."

Varga's smile falters.

"You've been right all year, by the way," I say. "Every time you said it. On the ice, in the scrum in January, on national TV. You were right. Congratulations." I lean back against the wall. "Now go lose to him."

Somebody by the wall laughs. It's short and surprised and it echoes down the cinderblock.

Varga opens his mouth. Nothing comes out.

He walks away down the hall. The rest of the Nashville line follows him. A couple of them look back at me. One of them, a young kid I don't know, nods at me. Just once.

Gus is still standing in the equipment room doorway with his stack of towels.

"Captain," he says.

"Not anymore, Gus."

"Captain," Gus says again, firmly, and goes back inside.

My phone's buzzing in my jacket pocket. It's been buzzing since the Tribune guy. I take it out.

Laurel: Saw it. Proud of you. Now go watch him win. — L.

Saul: Well, I'll be damned. Call me after. Also my son says you're allowed to have a cool jersey now.

My sister, Karen: CARBURETORS. Then, a second later: Love you, dummy. Mom's crying. Good crying.