The brief detour helps. Then the room returns to the question.
I turn toward him on the couch. "I am going to be here while you figure it out."
He goes very still.
The sentence is not polished. It is too large and too imprecise and not legally reviewed. It offers no timeline, no procedure, no measurable outcome. It is possibly the least professional thing I have ever said.
It is also the truest.
Nolan looks at me like he is trying to decide where the hook is.
"You don't know how long that takes," he says.
"No."
"You don't know what it looks like."
"No."
"I don't know what I look like without hockey."
"I know."
"Do you?"
The question is sharp. Not angry. Afraid.
I think of the Adrian film. My younger self taking a pass he had no business taking. The version of me that wanted the game to want him back. The grief of becoming adjacent to the thing I loved instead of inside it. Different scale. Different stakes. Same shape in miniature.
"A little," I say.
Nolan's eyes hold mine.
"I wanted to play," I say. "Not like you. Not at this level. I was never close enough for that grief to be this grief. But I wanted it. And then I had to become someone who could stay near the game without being chosen by it."
His face changes at the word chosen.
"How?" he asks.
I laugh once, quietly. "Badly, for a while."
He waits.
"I overworked. I made myself useful. I decided if I could understand the game better than people who got to keep playing it, that would be a kind of compensation."
"Was it?"
"Sometimes."
"And the rest?"
"The rest was grief wearing a credential."
Nolan looks down at his hands.
I let him.
"I don't want a credential," he says.
