“You’ve thought this through,” he said.
“Yes.”
He closed the file. Put his hand on it.
“Is there a personal element here,” he said.
The room went quiet.
He wasn’t accusing me. He wasn’t fishing for gossip. It was a professional question from a GM who needed to understand whether the man in front of him was thinking about the team or about himself , as if those were separate things.
I could have lied.
I could have said: no, this is purely hockey, purely system, purely numbers.
I didn’t.
“My best player might get moved for image reasons,” I said. “That’s my personal concern.”
We looked at each other.
Callahan exhaled once, a careful breath.
“The case is strong,” he said. “I’m not going to pretend otherwise. I’ll take it to ownership. I can’t promise you an outcome , that wouldn’t be honest. But this,” he tapped the file, “gives me more than I had. It gives them more than they had.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“This conversation,” he said.
“Stays here,” I said. “I know.”
He nodded once.
“Felix,” he added, as I reached the door.
I turned.
“You’re a valuable player,” he said. “So is he. No one’s not aware of that.”
He didn’t say: that’s why this is complicated.
He didn’t need to.
I walked out.
The corridor outside the GM’s office was the same neutral non,place it had been last time , carpet, fluorescent lighting, a framed photo from a charity game that had been there since before I joined the organization. I walked past it without seeing it.
My feet took me to the stairwell.
I stood there, hand on the railing, breathing in air that smelled like recycled HVAC and faintly of coffee from the coaches’ floor.
The hockey case had been made.
This was the thing I had told myself I needed before I did anything else. Make the argument. Use the system. Prove, with numbers, that the line was worth keeping for reasons that hadnothing to do with who I was or what I wanted. Remove the possibility that any decision I made could be written off , by management, by Shay, by myself , as born of panic over a trade.
The case was made.
Ownership would do what ownership did. The file was going upstairs. There was nothing more I could do on that axis.
