"Try telling Berger. He's got us a six-eight problem and rising." He grabs the water bottle and drinks. "You nervous? Coach gives you the third if this holds, you know that."
"I'm not nervous."
"Sure." He bumps his glove against my pad. "Be a little nervous. It means it counts."
Then he's back over the boards, and I run the count and watch my goalie work and feel the score climb in my chest the way the crowd feels it. I'd never say that out loud.
Late in the second it's five to one, and Coach comes down the bench and stops in front of me.
"Third's yours," he says. "Get loose."
"Yeah?"
"Soucy." He waits until I look at him. "It's the playoffs. You earned it. Go have fun."
I stand and start the small private business of getting a body ready to go somewhere it's never been. During intermission, Lundy slides down next to me, eyes on the room and not on me.
"Play the save in front of you," he says.
"That's my line."
"It's a good line." His hand taps my pad once, same as it has a hundred times, and I don't recalibrate around it the way I'd recalibrate around anyone else's hand, because his hand has never once been a thing I needed to manage. "Borrowing it. Go enjoy your barn."
"It's not my barn."
"It is tonight."
The walk to the crease at the top of the third is twelve strides. I take all of them.
I hear the horn, feel the cage of my own mask, and then the blue paint under my skates and the net at my back. The noise drops away. There is only the geometry, and the geometry is the one language I have never had to translate.
Their first rush comes wide, and I'm already at the top of the paint, already square, because the winger drops his shoulder before he cuts, and the shoulder tells me where the puck is going before he knows. He cuts. I'm there. It hits the pad, and I steer it to the corner. Davis clears it. The building releases a collective breath I feel in my bones.
"Back door's mine," I tell Davis when he looks back. "You take the strong side, I've got the weak."
"Copy."
It’s not loud in here. That is the part nobody understands. Out there my brain is a machine that won't stop running. The room, every object, every angle, the tally that never closes. In here, it runs the only thing worth running. The bodies and the lanes andthe half-second before the half-second. Nothing underneath it. No count. No list. Just the puck and where it's going and the plain fact that I will be there when it arrives. I tap Gertie, then Quessa. They hold the corners they always hold.
A two-on-one comes at me halfway through. "Take the shooter," I call to my D. "I've got the pass." I read the pass before it's a pass, and I stay big and take the post away and dare the shooter to beat me with his hands. He tries the seam instead. The seam was never open. "There," I say, to nobody, to the post, to the part of me that already knew. The whistle goes.
Off the next faceoff they win it back to the point and a shot comes through a clean lane and I catch it in the glove and hold it. The building stands. Davis bumps my pads on his way past.
"That looked easy."
"Nothing's easy. It just gets to where it looks that way."
They get one late. Six on five, their goalie pulled in a game already lost, a point shot through a screen I never see clean and a tip off a stick at the edge of the blue paint that beats me low. The light goes on. In here, it doesn't touch me.
I dig the puck out, hand it to the ref, tap the posts, reset my depth, because the next shot is the only shot that exists and the last one is already gone. I told Lundy that and I believe it standing in the paint where believing it's easy.
The horn ends it. Six to two. Twenty minutes, my first in the playoffs, one goal I'd want back and a building on its feet that didn't pay to watch me fail. The guys pour off the bench. Davis cracks me on the helmet and Marchetti is yelling with his taped wrist in the air. I let them have it. It's good. I mean it.
I'm halfway up the tunnel, guards on, the roar still going behind me, when the goal starts to play. The screen I never saw clean. I run it back without deciding to. The point shot and the bodies in front of it, the tip, the angle I gave up, and the question underneath it that has no good answer because we won by fourand it doesn't matter and my brain has never once cared whether a thing matters.
I could have had it if I'd seen the release but I didn't. I need to know whether that was the screen or whether I cheated my depth, and I'm not going to learn it in a tunnel, which means I'll learn it later, on a tablet, alone, for as long as it takes.
Lundy comes up beside me in his own guards. Says nothing. Bumps my shoulder with his. We go in together while the building keeps making its impossible noise.
