"I keep waiting for it to click again," he admitted. "You know? Like one day I'm going to wake up and everything will feel normal."
The words settled heavily between us.
Normal.
I wasn't entirely sure either of us remembered what that looked like anymore.
The last year had been brutal on him in ways most people would never understand. Fans saw statistics. They saw standings. They saw wins and losses. They didn't see the phone calls. The hospital visits. The funeral.
They didn't see a son trying to figure out how to keep moving after losing his mother.
Tannen wasn't the kind of person who talked about those things often. Most of the time, he carried them quietly.
Maybe too quietly.
"You don't have to figure everything out today," I said.
His laugh was softer this time. "Coach would probably disagree."
"Coach would tell you to stop reading your own press."
"Coach tells everybody that."
"Because everybody needs to hear it."
That finally earned a genuine smile. Not a big one. Just enough to remind me that he was still in there somewhere beneath all the pressure he'd been carrying.
The problem was that the smile disappeared almost as quickly as it arrived. Then Tannen looked away.
Finally, he let out a slow breath. "You know what the worst part is?"
I waited.
"I can't tell whether I'm struggling because I'm grieving or because my game is actually slipping."
Tannen stared across the room. "I've spent my entire career knowing exactly who I was on the ice." He laughed softly. "It might not have been every night or every shift. But overall? I knew." His jaw tightened. "Now I don't."
I leaned back against the bench and let him talk.
"Everybody says it's temporary. That I'll find my game again. That I'll get through this." He rubbed a hand across the back of his neck. "Maybe they're right."
His gaze dropped to the floor. "But what if they're not?"
The question hung between us.
"What if this isn't a slump? What if this is the start of the decline and I'm too stubborn to see it? I've watched it happen to other guys. One year, they're leading the team. Then next they're playing fewer minutes. Then they're fighting to keep their spot in the lineup. Before long, people are talking about them in the past tense while they're still in the room." A humorless laugh escaped him. "I always told myself I'd know when it was time. But lately I don't know much of anything."
For the first time since the conversation started, he wasn't talking about a bad game.
Or a bad month.
He was talking about the possibility that the version of himself he'd spent his entire adult life becoming might already be slipping away.
And that was a fear no amount of talent could protect him from.
The silence that followed felt heavier than anything he'd said before.
"I don't want to be the guy hanging on because he can't let go."
