The building holds its breath.
Hájek's release is clean, low, the puck sliding flat across seventy feet of chewed ice and finding the back of the empty net with the sound that empty-net goals make.
Three-one.
The building detonates. I am over the boards before the horn finishes and I hit Hájek at the blue line with both arms and his helmet is crooked and his mouth guard is hanging from his cage and his face is the face of a twenty-year-old who just scored the goal that sends his team to the playoffs.
"You absolute beauty," I tell him. "You gorgeous Czech bastard."
"I just shot it," he says. He is grinning and his eyes are wet and he is twenty and I am twenty-four and the kid who bumped a bench on his way to his stall in September just sent us to the postseason.
"You shot it into an empty net from the center line. That is not just shot it. That is a nine-point-two."
"A nine-point-two?"
"Maybe a nine-three. I'll confirm after film review."
The pile finds us. Thompson's arm across my back. Marchetti's voice from somewhere inside the mass, words that are not words, just the sound a man makes when the season is still alive. The pile is heavy and warm and loud and I am inside it.
The clock runs out. Three-one. The first-year expansion team that nobody projected past twenty-eighth is going to the playoffs.
I stand on the ice and the confetti is falling and the building is screaming and I am here. Not narrating being here. Not performing celebration for a team that needs me to perform it. Just here, standing on ice that belongs to us, in a building that is ours.
The locker room has completely lost its mind. Somebody has produced champagne. Thompson is spraying it without aim or restraint. Marchetti has his sweater off and is standing on a bench conducting an invisible orchestra with his water bottle.
"Four-point-one," I call across the room, holding up one finger.
"What?" Thompson yells.
"The champagne. Four-point-one. Barely qualifies as a sparkling beverage. Whoever bought this should be fined."
"We just made the playoffs and you're rating the champagne."
"Making the playoffs does not excuse bad champagne, Thompson. Standards are not seasonal."
"Berger, I will pour this entire bottle on your head."
"That would be a waste of a four-point-one, which means it would be a waste of almost nothing, so go ahead."
Thompson pours it. I stand there with champagne running down my face and my undershirt soaked and the room is laughing and I am laughing and the champagne is terrible and the night is definitely a ten.
Mueller is at his stall with a towel and the expression of a man cataloguing the evening for future reference.
"Mueller. Rate the clinch."
"I don't rate things. That's your department."
"Everyone rates things, Mueller. You just don't announce it."
"Seven."
"Seven? A seven for a first-season playoff clinch? That is an insult to this franchise."
"Seven for the game. Nine for the result."
"That is not how clinches work."
"It's how math works, Berger."
