I have been ready my whole career for exactly this.
Their best scorer gets the puck at the top of the circle.
Fifty-two seconds into overtime. Clean look. Full speed. No defenseman between him and me.
I know this shot.
I’ve watched the tape every morning for two weeks. I know his release point — high glove side, always, when he has time and space he goes high glove. He has time. He has space.
The ghost rises.
Right there in my blocker hand — the half-inch, the hesitation, the thing that lived in my right hand for two seasons before someone sat down next to me in a tunnel and named it for me. It rises.
I don’t flinch. I know where it lives.
I read the shot all the way in. Every second of it. The lean, the weight transfer, the shoulder telling me exactly where the puck is going before it leaves the tape. Glove hand up.
The puck hits leather.
Stays there.
The arena exhales all at once — one massive release of sound — and I just stand there in my crease and look at my glove.
The puck is in my hand.
Yeah.
Forty-one seconds later Aiden puts one top shelf on a two-on-one.
I hear the horn from my crease. I hear the building come apart. I hear Brody somewhere behind me making a sound I’ve never heard a human being make before. I hear a city that showed up before it was reasonable getting to be right.
I hear four seasons.
The pile finds me. Aiden first, then Liam, then Brody — arms around all of us, face completely wet, not acknowledging any of it — then Sebastian and Caleb and Coach Barnes and everyone, everyone, everyone.
I let it happen.
All of it.
Every single second.
Brody’s arms. Aiden’s voice saying something I can’t hear over the noise. Liam — who never does this, who has never once in four seasons been the one to reach first — gets his hand on the back of my neck and just holds it there for a second.
That’s the one that gets me.
I surface from the pile. Look up.
Through the crowd, through the chaos, through the building still losing its mind — through all of it — I find the press box.
She’s lowering the camera. Already looking at me.
One look across the whole arena.
That’s everything.
Chapter thirty-five
Jax
